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It's like the old joke, a guy is walking through the park and he sees an old man playing chess with a dog. He says "Wow, that must be the smartest dog in the world!" The old man says "He's not that smart, I almost always win."

But can it outsmart a bullet?

I bet you can I get a better SAT score than any "Ursus arctos horribilis" that you can field ;)

True, but that sort of smarts won't help me fight the bear. Bears plan ahead. They learn from past experiences. If you "play dead", they'll rough you up to make sure you're not a threat, then leave you be -- but they'll watch you for a while to see if you were faking it and get up.

My favorite "smart bear" story is an area where bears have learned how to get into bear canisters people use to protect their food from bears. They'll sneak into your camp, roll the canister to a cliff, and push it off to crack it open on the rocks below. And they teach other bears how to do this.

A ranger once told me that the real difficulty in making bear-proof garbage receptacles is that the smarter bears are more intelligent than the dumber humans.