I did really well in school, and am a professional developer now, and my wife utterly destroys me at this game.
She can find sets in real time as the cards are being dealt, while singing along with music, it's maddening.
She can find sets in real time as the cards are being dealt, while singing along with music, it's maddening.
I met a woman once who could gather four-leaf clovers nearly instantly, at the same spot where me and my male friends had spent minutes searching.
I've seen written in some places (but could not find a worthy source) that women might have better peripheral vision due to food gathering in prehistoric times, but this might just be some old sexist construct (if anyone knows a good source to confirm or refute this, please tell me).
I'm a male btw
Perhaps that ability decline is just my current reluctance to get down on my hands and knees and leaf through them by hand.
"Subitizing is the rapid, accurate, and confident judgement of numbers performed for small numbers of items. [...] The accuracy, speed, and confidence with which observers make judgments of the number of items are critically dependent on the number of elements to be enumerated. Judgments made for displays composed of around one to four items are rapid, accurate and confident."
This came up at a party. Six people playing Set, all of us from different cities, and the three that took band in high school utterly dominated the three that didn't. The reason? Field trips. The Band kids had all played Set for hours on buses, the rest of us had only played it once or twice and lost interest.
Nice work :)
"Will this STUNNING mathematical breakthrough in a children's card game finally make Kim leave Kanye?"
> Go players activate the brain region of vision, and literally think by seeing the board state. A lot of Go study is seeing patterns and shapes... 4-point bend is life, or Ko in the corner, Crane Nest, Tiger Mouth, the Ladder... etc. etc.
> Go has probably been so hard for computers to "solve" not because Go is "harder" than Chess (it is... but I don't think that's the primary reason), but instead because humans brains are innately wired to be better at Go than at Chess. The vision-area of the human's brain is very large, and "hacking" the vision center of the brain to make it think about Go is very effective.
Speaking solely of scrabble, this happens pretty often regardless of skill level. ;-) I try to keep 3 games going at a time, but my last 5 have quit in the first three turns! And I'm using a matchmaking algorithm, so they're players of my approximate skill level too!
I can confirm that it works and nobody wants to play Monopoly anymore. Instead we play more fun board games
Though you will find exceptions, of course. The current number one game on BGG is Pandemic Legacy [1], a purely cooperative game.
[0] https://youtube.com/user/rahdo
[1] https://boardgamegeek.com/boardgame/161936/pandemic-legacy-s...
I see it as a split between "casuals" and "competitive" players. Competitive players find fun in attempting to win or giving it their best shot while casual players see winning as a bonus and just want to have fun. Which may or may not involve playing with the best strategies or giving it their best.
I also agree entirely with lmm. The best games are games that are fun even when losing. If you can't have fun while losing (eg: Monopoly) then I don't consider it a good game.
Granted, my wife is well-educated and I believe she is smarter than I am, but it's like she immediately sees the solution while I see the input and have to work out the solution. I usually attribute this to my deficient color vision, since that's the property that usually trips me up. Alternatively, I've wondered if I'm focusing too hard and if the best approach might be reacting on instinct and relying on my subconscious to solve the problem before I'm consciously aware of having parsed the input.