I've been playing around with trying to arbitrarily quantify perceived intellect.

Here's my working formula at the moment:

`P = A * SUM([B * C * TopicA] + [B * C * TopicB] + [B * C * TopicC] [...])`

Where:

P = Perceived intellect

A = Coefficient that measures the ability to connect different concepts

B = Depth of knowledge of a topic

C = Ability to break down topic into concepts

The people I perceive to be smart come up with logically-sound answers to questions they don't know the answer to, based on past knowledge.

If I ask `what is X?`, they say `I don't know what X is, but based on Y and Z, it might be ...`

So if you're trying to identify if this person can come off as smart, perhaps a tactic could be asking them a question about a domain they are not an expert in.