It's from "The Man Who Mistook His Wife For A Hat". Here's the excerpt: http://empslocal.ex.ac.uk/people/staff/mrwatkin/isoc/twins.htm The Yamaguchi paper casts some doubt on the accuracy of the account. Tom James Propp writes:
Oliver Sacks (z"l) wrote in one of his books about some twins who were remarkably good at factoring numbers. Does anyone remember the details? I remember being a little bit suspicious, because at least one of the feats seem to require more parallel processing power than I imagine human brains to be capable of (leaving aside sensory processing, which is hard-wired). But I also felt that we don't know enough about brains to know what brains can or can't do.
Jim Propp
PS: z"l is a Hebrew abbreviation for "may his/her memory be a blessing".
On Wednesday, March 9, 2016, Christian Lawson-Perfect < christianperfect@gmail.com> wrote:
This week I made a game which has turned out to be like crack to maths fans - http://isthisprime.com/game/. You're shown a number, and you have to decide if it's prime or not. The aim is to correctly sort as many numbers as possible within a minute; the game ends as soon as you get one wrong.
So, I thought that would appeal on its own merits to math-funsters, but I have a question which occurred to me while talking about it with Colin Wright: since primes become rarer the higher you go, at what point is just clicking "No" as good a strategy as doing any thinking? I suppose I could rephrase and slightly change the question to: if the maximum number you can be shown increases by a factor of X each time you make a correct decision, what's the expected score of a strategy that just clicks "no" every time?
And finally, I'm collecting data on each attempt made at the game. I expect to be able to come up with some interesting statistics about people's intuitions on primality. So far, 51 seems to be by the far most "primey" composite, before factoring in the likelihoods of particular numbers being shown. _______________________________________________ math-fun mailing list math-fun@mailman.xmission.com <javascript:;> https://mailman.xmission.com/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/math-fun
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