Shakuntala Devi – The Human Computer (2016) | Hacker News Reader

Shakuntala Devi – The Human Computer (2016)

petersmagnusson.org

> In Devi’s case, we don’t know what techniques she used for this demonstration. Why? Because she never told people.

Yes we do. Yes she did.

Devi published a book in 1977, entitled Figuring: The Joy of Numbers. "Cubes and Cube Roots" is chapter 9.

All of the stuff that Peter S. Magnusson claims that Devi never told people about taking the cube root of an 8-digit number is right there in Devi's 1977 book, on page 81 in my copy.

Yep, I still remember reading the book when my dad it got for me (I was 8!). I don't recall everything, but few things stuck with me from the book. Exponential growths, for example. I sort of recall that she took the example of either how does a rumor spreads, or about MLM selling cookers. Or it was the two together! (I need to check the Archive link after demonstrating that some nuggets stuck with me, and have helped made sense of stuff somehow :)

I was never good with numbers so didn't actually tried those calculations, but just reading the book was like enlightenment. (We got pleased too quickly as kids...).

Thanks for this!

Edit. My memory is very hazy! I read most of her books, these examples were in her "Puzzles to Puzzle you" and other books. Or maybe not, but here are some more: (found on a pdf... http://sriramanavidyalaya.school/assets/files/More%20Puzzles...)

Edit. Check out 66th puzzle. Not related to examples, but hey -- this is something I still use to get paid! Highly recommend this book for your young ones. :)

archive.org! My copy was on the bookshelf next to the computer. (-:

On the subject of memory: The section on pi has two mistakes, alas, which I found to be particularly unfortunate. One of the mnemonic poems has a misprint "never more" instead of "nevermore", leading to a knock-on error in the digits beneath it, and there's a second error in the digits where the word "passed" in the poem is counted incorrectly as 5 letters.

Unfortunately, that's what I first memorized pi from. I had to re-learn the correct decimal expansion.

As for the 66th puzzle, there's a clear inspiration for slipping that sort of question in and seeing if anyone who doesn't know better actually comes up with an answer. It's interesting to note that some of the items have indeed been answered since 1985. I wonder whether M. Devi had heard Robert Schuller's tale, which was in wide circulation by 1983.

* https://snopes.com/fact-check/the-unsolvable-math-problem/

Completely agree. This is the "formal training required" part that we miss while recounting these anecdotes. I still love the book, as in, It's giving you a sea to dip a little, look at pretty cool turtles, but one's gotta take a deep dive once in a while.

Thankfully I was never very good with numbers, so I only memorized it till the 6th digit so I could use it as my password!

(thankfully I can let my computer fix those for me :)

Better memory: "I used to think, hey I got sorta close to 10th digit, soon I'll know a lot more, yay!"

Ah, Edit: The deep dive should be with someone to pick you back out, in my experience.

> Figuring: The Joy of Numbers

Archive.org (link to the chapter): https://archive.org/details/B-001-014-505/page/n81/mode/2up

Here is a 1977 video of Shakuntala Devi's demonstration on national television https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MGBTHb0FigI

Curious to catch the very crisp English voicing by most speakers, compared with very distinct ways of speaking commonly heard from Indians from different provinces today.

The crispness in English has decreased with passing time since India's independence.

I really didn’t enjoy this presentation. Her attitude is what killed it for me and it’s unfortunate, because she has some amazing skills.

The author reduces her efforts to a ‘trade’. How is this different to how Terry Tao thinks about his field? Wouldn’t his ‘personalized heuristics’ about how to solve a problem also look like profound ability to an outsider?

Check out my own thread earlier up the thread. I think that'd be the difference, since she didn't get critical peer reviews on her work which is how we've decided to do science. The thread is interesting to me because I was recounting fun memories, which can very easily end up to a conspiracy theory. But thankfully, I did not start solving them then.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24295270

If curious see also

a 2013 thread from when she died: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5585233

The critiques against Shakuntala seem similar to the critiques against GPT-3 - maybe she memorised the root table, it only works for integer roots in a limited range, and so on. The question is always - how magic is the magic, and in fact isn't it just a useless trick?

This will go all the way upto AGI.

maybe we are living in a simulation and that's just how the matrix glitches to fk with us

Absolutely this.

She is my inspiration, would like to share one of her quotres here for HN audience

"Education is not just about going to school and getting a degree. It’s about widening your knowledge and absorbing the truth about life."

From little I read, it is not clear if she was comparably intelligent in general or just a fluke in brain that gave her a prototype math co-processor.

She has done exceptional calculations and she used to do shows where people got to ask her random number multiplication and they'd verify it with a calculator.

She wasn't a fluke. Unfortunately, she didn't contribute to Maths because she didn't have education

In Ramanujan's biography, there is a mention of a british guy who was very fast at calculations. He was faster than Ramanujan himself. Unlike Ramanujan, that guy had easy access to all the modern math literature of the time but still he wasn't a mathematician. And Ramanujan became first class mathematician even without any resources or formal education.

I think doing calculation is mechanical skill. But gaining insights from those calculations is wholly different skill.

Yes she was just a fast computer. She never claimed that she is a maths person

No way denying her prowess in calculations. Simply curious if it translates to multi-dimensional intelligence or was it limited to calculations. Also, I am not questioning her general intelligence, but when I said fluke, I meant if growth/difference in some part of brain gave her 1 in a billion intelligence but limited only to mathematical calculations.

Oh like that? I watched her biopic and she was having general intelligence I think, based on the biopic.

She was a jerk to her parents and to her only daughter. But at the end she did patch up with her daughter.

I don't think she was outstanding outside maths.

> just a fluke in brain that gave her a prototype math co-processor.

Would a better word of choice be "predisposition to do arithmetic"? I've been wondering the same with artists in general (painters, musicians, etc.). Would a person without the predisposition be able to practice say Piano/Vocals for years together and reach a certain level of artistry? Any reference to academic studies on this would be appreciated.

EDIT: Formatting

I am pretty confident a lot of extreme outliers do have some innate predisposition in any field. It is such that the world beaters have their talent identified, nurtured and perfected at the right age and an outlet created. Also i think it is considered impolite to completely base our intelligence, understanding or creativity on some natural gift nowadays due to some kind of just world fallacy. Although i am still inclined to personally believe that nurture is more important and you can do many good things reasonably well if your specific talent was nurtured well and you did not have some unfortunate mental deficiency that you were born with. Till recently very few people in the world had the right kind of nurture - education. I had a lot of challenges in some fields when in school, however unlike in the Western world the school system in my location was rigid and i could not improve on my weaknesses.

Don't stress too much. She was good with calculations, just like Kathrine Johnson.

https://www.nasa.gov/content/katherine-johnson-biography

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