Most of the article is only worth skimming through, but don't skim so fast that you miss the kernel at the end ;)
> Sometimes, people who don't understand any better confuse the mundane with the divine, mistake hard work for lightning bolts. They couldn't pull off that same stunt, and so they convince themselves that nobody else could, either. Her brain can't possibly work that way, that fast. There's no way she solved that puzzle on her own. The game must be rigged.
> Or Burke has a gift, and she improved it with study. She practiced. She found the little edges and secrets that make large-size success possible; she did every last bit of the math. She earned her way to her place behind the wheel, and then, on that fateful day, in that particular pattern of rectangles and lights, she saw all that she needed to beat it.
>Sometimes, people who don't understand any better confuse the mundane with the divine, mistake hard work for lightning bolts.
Now that is condescending.
>They couldn't pull off that same stunt, and so they convince themselves that nobody else could, either.
Suppose you'd never met Rain-Man and saw him pull off one of his counting "stunts". Wouldn't your null hypothesis be that it was a trick? Now you meet someone else, Derren Brown say, doing the same trick do you assume he does it the same way or is it really a trick. Next you try with a buddy - first time he gets it right, WTH? Savant, conjurer or lucky?
Once at school I got a run of about 8 dates fired at me (I can't remember the context it might have been birth dates) and told people the day of the week correctly for that date. They wondered how I did it, and as I'm good at maths, figured it was some mental ability. As it happened I just guessed.
The probability of getting 8 weekdays right in a row by random guessing is 1/7^8, or about 1 in 6 million. So my random guess is that either the number was substantially less than 8, or there was actually some extra information that you made use of somehow, or you didn't really get them right and the other people were just messing with your head. Or, of course, you're messing with ours.
It's crazy isn't it. Seriously, it was one of those moments where you think "hey how am I doing this". I really thought for a very short while I had some sort of untapped savantish ability to know the day for any date (I think there are people that can do this based on some form of learning|equation?). In actual fact I can barely remember the day it is today ...
The dates were being checked on this one kids graphing calc. He was the only person in the class, in the school I suspect, that had one.
Whilst the chance of guessing 1 in 7 eight times in a row is very small, a string of guesses that are correct in a larger population of guesses has no greater probability of being in any particular place in the string than any other. Provided that if I'd continued guessing a large number of times then I only achieved c. 14% correct then there is nothing wrong statistically with such a feat ...
Maybe I didn't guess at all. Maybe I had a psychic link with my classmates Casio ... ;0)
For each of the Rain-Man savants in the world who can look at a pile of dropped toothpicks fresh from the box and tell you that there are 1996 rolling across the floor, there are a hundred savvy chaps who will see a fresh box with "2000 count" on the side, the four remaining un-dropped toothpicks, and make an educated guess.
There are people who have always been able to look at a Rubix cube and solve it on intuition, but that number's piddling compared to the people who can do something that looks exactly the same, but involved practice, study, interest, and the gradual honing of some basic principles into a slick, refined art.
Not to mention, so long as there is more than one Rain-Man savant the one you see & are impressed by has plenty of sweat and blood into it too. How else did he rise to the top from amongst the other savants? He wasn't just 'more savant'.
>The results of hard work and dedication always look like luck to saps.
I also think it's interesting that people who don't understand any better confuse the mundane with the divine, but she was convinced that the guy in front of her could solve the puzzle because she could.
It's the same as how technology looks like majikk to the unfamiliar. It wasn't until I had built from transistors to pipeline stages that I started to see the inside of a CPU in my head- up until that point, it might as well have been majikk, and when you don't understand what's going on you can't have any notion of the scale. Hence 'luck' or 'cheat' or 'majikk'.
My general impression is that the cryptographers routinely do stuff that's an order of magnitude more mind-blowing than this. [1]
More people need to read The Codebreakers.
---
[1] Alas, I just have to marvel, because for some reason my mind doesn't anagram well. I just don't have the knack. To me high-level Scrabble playing looks like a superpower.
"Alas, I just have to marvel, because for some reason my mind doesn't anagram well. I just don't have the knack. To me high-level Scrabble playing looks like a superpower."
Ken Jennings (the Jeopardy genius) has a blog post about this as well [1]. It seems to me once you start down the decision tree starting with "I'VE GOT" at the start, your average native English speaker should be able to get the right answer quite easily.
I think the most telling part of that blog post is:
"Caitlin spins and guesses an ‘L’. Note that she has not yet solved the puzzle at this point…if she was sure, she would have guessed ‘T’, a safe guess worth three times the money. Why guess a second-tier letter like ‘L’? She’s probably assuming the first word (_ ‘ _ _), with its apostrophe, is “I’LL,” but can’t figure out what comes next. “I’ll put?” “I’ll say?”"
What I found interesting about Ken's post was his conjecture that many other players have solved the text after just one letter, but carried on playing to maximize their cash winnings. According to him, we only know about her because she chose to solve the problem and not risk the wheel. Thus, ending the game after one letter may be extremely rare, but solving the problem after one letter may be less rare than it seems.
Used to watch the show with my Grandma a lot as a kid, and very often people who know the answer (you can generally tell based on their confidence, and the fact that they never buy a vowel) will keep spinning in order to make more money.
It's worth noting that she claims she had solved the puzzle by that point:
She landed on $900 and picked L. "I'm not sure why," she says. "I should have picked G or T, but I think because it was in the middle of the biggest word, I got stuck on it."
She would have made $1,800 more with G or T. But had she picked G or T, she wouldn't have solved the puzzle with just a single letter. She would have solved it with three. She probably would have still gone on to crush the game — Burke ended up taking it for more than $53,000 in cash and prizes — but she wouldn't have become the miracle contestant.
L seems better to make it certain, knowing the first word wasn't I'LL and the L in the middle of FEELING probably made her much more confident, picking G or T could have meant no letters correct if the first word was I'LL.
Unfortunately, that also contradicts what she said in the article:
(before her spin)
She was positive she was right. "There was no doubt in my mind," she says.
(when choosing her letter)
She landed on $900 and picked L. "I'm not sure why," she says. "I should have picked G or T, but I think because it was in the middle of the biggest word, I got stuck on it."
On some level I assume that's what she was doing, probably some level of pressure on the game show, she could be sure but some part of her probably wanted to confirm it a little more.
This American Life did a great show this summer which included a story about a man who figured out the pattern in the board on the 80's game show Press Your Luck and took them for a lot of money. Definitely worth a listen:
Now that I look at the rest of that episode, it also included some coverage of the Cambridge Innovation Center's Elevator Pitch contest, so all around a good listen for the HN crowd.
I watched these episodes as a kid when they were shown on CBS the first time.
After about 10 spins or so it became obvious (or so I thought at the time) that he was waiting for a certain corner-corner-this.square combination to come up and then it would always stop on the $+spin square. There was nothing musical in there at all.
Musical hacks. It sounds like he hit STOP every time a certain note played. Maybe he noticed a pattern that whenever someone hit "stop" on that note it landed on a "big bucks" icon. So account for reaction time/delay, and ta-daa. $100,000.
He realized that there were a set number of patterns. Once he figured that out it was easy to hit the button when the next square was going to be the one he wanted.
No, it wasn't. I looked at the still frame for about 20 seconds and got it myself, before I saw the video.
It just took a little logic about what words could possibly be in certain places, and the rest was filled in by phrases I heard in the past.
Edit: Don't get me wrong! It took guts for her to do that. If she got it just a little wrong, she gave the next person a LOT of hints and it likely wouldn't get back to her.
Yes, I recall amazing my family with a zero-letter solve before too. It's not trivial, but I suspect we'd have an above-average concentration of people who could do that around here.
No way could I do it under pressure right now, but then, if I knew I had a Wheel of Fortune appearance coming up you'd better believe I'd be studying and practicing. It amazes me that it's so obvious that so few people do that. Also how many people play so badly from a game theoretic standpoint; spinning a $400 on a puzzle with an obvious solution and a few open letters including one triple letter, they choose one of the single letters then solve. No prize puzzle, etc.
> It's not trivial, but I suspect we'd have an above-average concentration of people who could do that around here.
I don't know about that. All that's required is memorize and recall word lists, breaking down a puzzle into components, and being able to do both of those quickly. I think most people would be able to do it given practice. Most school tests I've taken require similar skills.
I agree entirely. What I think would be above average around here is the number of people who have made some effort in that direction, especially the "breaking it down into components" part. It isn't that being an HN type is an intrinsic advantage, it is that it is a shorter trip for us.
Followed the embedded YouTube video and was rather disgusted by the comments on it. Almost all suggested she cheated, and half suggested it in an incredibly disgusting/demeaning/sexist way. Is this what the broader culture assumes when a woman pulls off something clever?
Don't make the mistake of reading YouTube comments and making any sort of broad judgments from them. It's pretty widely agreed that YouTube comments are one of the strangest phenomenon online.
Apostrophes help you alot. I solved the following puzzle with no letters:
_ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ ' _
_ _ _ _
Category was "Thing".
(Err, formatting isn't helping. That's two words, with 9 spaces, an apostrophe and a 10th space in the first word, and four spaces in the second word).
Schindler's List 33
president's plan 32
Microsoft's Xbox 26
yesterday's post 17
boatswain's mate 16
highlight's from 16 <-- need to include only nouns
Elizabeth's time 16
Wednesday's show 13
Microsoft's IPTV 11
The answer didn't appear in the corpus, but there was 1 entry for
Pinocchio nose <-- no apostrophe and 's'
Looks like i need a bigger corpus and more data scrubbing, there must've been something else that tipped you off before or during the show...
Presumably you didn't write it by hand as you'd use duckgo.com then I suspect. So, why not provide the terminal page URL instead of this forwarding page?
I set it as my default search engine in Chrome, and it first I kept going to Google manually for specific searches where duckduckgo isn't good enough, yet. But after I learned that "!g <search>" would do that for me with less hassle, I grew much happier with duckduckgo.
I was aware of the bang syntax - just if you manually wrote out the URL I expected you to use "dukgo.com/?q=!wa ..-.." or whatever rather than a long handed version.
Personally I use "wa" as a search keyword and then enter "wa ..-.." into my address bar.
I find it interesting that most of the guesses to this puzzle here are perfectly valid solutions; they do fit the pattern, but they just aren't he solution that you have in mind. And there's no reliable way to take the puzzle as given and arrive at your solution; it would have to be a matter of guessing the one of the multiple possible solutions that happens to be correct.
Even discounting all of the logic involved in this instance, people do occasionally just get lucky.
When I was in the fifth grade, we were playing hangman in class and my friend Chingfei managed to discern "White Men Can't Jump" from only two or three letters. An impressive feat, proven by the fact that I remember this 14 years later.
A "miracle" is really something with an extremely minuscule chance of occurring, but with enough trials you'll eventually get a positive result. Even the Biblical "water into wine" could happen under the laws of quantum mechanics, but it's an insanely long shot.
Still, in this case it was logic, not luck, that played out, since no rational person would just guess at solving the puzzle so early in the game.
I'LL HAVE WHAT SHE'S HAVING — didn't come close to fitting the puzzle, but it made I'LL seem an unlikely starting point. Because HAVE is the word that probably follows I'LL, and here, Burke was searching for a three-letter word.
Um, what?
I'll GET
I'll SEW
I'll AGE
I'll BAY
I'll BET
I'll DIG
I appreciate that none of these conjure memories of phrases off the top of my head, but the idea that "have" is often the only option following "I'll" is simply not true.
Let's face it, she's quick on her feet, smart, familiar with phrases and - most importantly - got lucky.
Phrases aren't drawn from anywhere in the English language. They must be guessable.
There are not many phrases in popular culture starting with those combinations (only "I'll get it," comes to mind). On the other hand phrases from movies are common, and those with mild sexual references are more entertaining.
I'm pretty sure the phrase itself played a part here. Just imagine it - you've figured out something that fits using only one letter. You're probably feeling a little bit excited, but it's a bit of a gamble to guess - how many other phrases might fit? Do you have a good feeling about it...?
No, it's not a miracle. I've done it before without any letters on the board. Just a happy coincidence where one of the thoughts floating in your brain happens to be the clue that day.
> Sometimes, people who don't understand any better confuse the mundane with the divine, mistake hard work for lightning bolts. They couldn't pull off that same stunt, and so they convince themselves that nobody else could, either. Her brain can't possibly work that way, that fast. There's no way she solved that puzzle on her own. The game must be rigged.
> Or Burke has a gift, and she improved it with study. She practiced. She found the little edges and secrets that make large-size success possible; she did every last bit of the math. She earned her way to her place behind the wheel, and then, on that fateful day, in that particular pattern of rectangles and lights, she saw all that she needed to beat it.