Was the Wheel of Fortune one letter solve really a miracle?
esquire.com
esquire.com
> 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.
>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.
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 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)
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.
More people need to read The Codebreakers.
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[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.
I feel the exact same way. Well put.
These guys can anagram stuff like crazy, but don't know what most of the words they use even mean.
"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?”"
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.
(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."
(both quotes from the root article)
http://www.thisamericanlife.org/radio-archives/episode/412/m...
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
_ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ ' _
_ _ _ _
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).
SPOILER: .--. .. -. --- -.-. -.-. .... .. --- ... -. --- ... .
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?
http://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=.--.%20..%20-.%20---%20....
It's particularly curious because the page you give is an automated redirect and you'd have to stop the page loading to copy the link.
Just curious.
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.
By the way, a prefix of !hn defers to searchyc.com. There's a list at http://duckduckgo.com/bang.html
Personally I use "wa" as a search keyword and then enter "wa ..-.." into my address bar.
Or Microsoft's bing
or a fisherman's nets
or the president's pets
or a ballerina's toes
or (something that grows
when dishonesty flows)
Pinocchio's nose?
Bing
and ended up these top 10 entries:
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
Pinocchio nose <-- no apostrophe and 's'
Not that I recall, but maybe so.
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.
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.
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.
G. .UCK Y.URSEL.
(Phrase)
I'm not sure you have to qualify that as something she calls them. I think a lot of people would call those "chunks".