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I taught an octopus piano (It took 6 months) [video]

(www.youtube.com)
41 points weinzierl | 4 comments | 08 Nov 25 21:46 UTC | HN request time: 0.605s | source
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anigbrowl ◴[08 Nov 25 22:42 UTC] No.45860704[source]▶
Clickbait nonsense - one of those 'I did [impractical thing], watch what happens!' channels. He buys an octopus at a fish market and trains it to pull on levers styled as piano keys to get a food reward. By preselecting the tuning of the keys, eventually he gets it to play a few random notes in the same scale as his guitar noodling.
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1. causal ◴[08 Nov 25 22:56 UTC] No.45860803[source]▶
What did you expect, complete arpeggios and site-reading Mozart? In six months he taught a wild animal to go from nothing to understanding how to interact with a complex instrument, and do so with increasing sequences in response to a reward. That's really cool. Your expectations might be a tad high.
replies(2): >>45860945 #>>45861954 #
2. anigbrowl ◴[08 Nov 25 23:14 UTC] No.45860945[source]▶
Octopi are already famous for liking to play with things, and it had little else to do in its undersized tank. This is cat walking on piano keys stuff, not increasing sequences. I hope he released the octopus back into the wild after he got bored with it.
replies(1): >>45861769 #
3. paraknight ◴[09 Nov 25 00:45 UTC] No.45861769[source]▶
FYI: octopi is not the correct plural for octopus.
4. Rendello ◴[09 Nov 25 01:12 UTC] No.45861954[source]▶
Plus from a hacker perspective, there was clearly a lot of work put into those keyboards. He skimmed over it because it's for a different audience.