abfarid

In a way, yes, if you frame it right. To simplify, you're basically asking "is a calculator intelligent?", right? While it's an inanimate object, you could say that, in a way, it acquires knowledge from the buttons user presses and it applies knowledge to provide an output.

"But that's not making decisions, it's just circuits!", you might say. To which I might reply "Who's to say that you're making decisions? For all we know, human brains might also just be very complicated circuits with no agency at all, just like the calculator!".

IIRC, in his book The Singularity Is Near, Ray Kurzweil even assigns certain amount of intelligence to inanimate objects, such as rocks. A very low amount of course, and it might be a stretch, but still.

So yeah, it's really hard to draw a line for intelligence, which is why there's no firm definition and no consensus.

Of course there are various versions of NPCs, some stand and do nothing, others are more complex, they often "adapt" to certain conditions. For example, if an NPC is following the player it might "decide" to switch to running if the distance to the player reaches a certain threshold, decide how to navigate around other dynamic/moving NPCs, etc. In this example, the NPC "acquires" knowledge by polling the distance to the player and applies that "knowledge" by using its internal model to make a decision to walk or run.

The term "acquiring knowledge" is pretty much as subjective as "intelligence". In the case of an ant, for example, it can't really learn anything, at best it has a tiny short-term memory in which it keeps certain most recent decisions, but it surely gets things done, like building colonies.

For both cases, it's just a line in the sand.

I selected all and it's still not enough of a reason!

Bow to Alec! Let Alec consume you!

How dare you ignore Alec's video? 😤

Tekken, Lili vs. Panda.

Is that so? Then, I stand corrected and retract my complaint, it somewhat makes sense now. And in my defense, it's been more than a decade since I played and I think I finished it in one sitting, so it's a blur.

What, you don't find it fun to understand humor more in-depth by overanalyzing to death the aspects of a joke?! What a weirdo...

Let me try to, anyway.
IIRC, you start the game in the aquarium as an octopus, and then escape. That's when you're explicitly shown to be an octopus. Every NPC, however, sees the octopus in some amount of disguise. So even if we constantly roll a nat 1 on perception check like all the NPC, we didn't have to roll it on the first encounter, therefore we know it's an octopus.

That's what I meant, you're making the joke from the perspective of a person that doesn't realize there's an octopus in the game, even though there is one.

And the reason I said it's confusing is because the game title is only perceived by the player of the game, and the player is explicitly told/shown that you're playing as an octopus. So the perspective used in the joke is impossible, but I understand that I'm being pedantic, feel free to ignore my ramblings caused by the uncontrollable urge to point out the inconsistency.

With Octodad joke, are you implying that you didn't see through the disguise? If so, I don't think it fits with the rest and is confusing, tbh.

Kinda sad that it's almost never mentioned that this is just a scene with Inoue Orihime from Bleach.