On 2018-08-01 16:48, Hans Havermann wrote:
VE: "I clearly recall that when he was counting the number of spilled matches on the floor he verbalized 62,62,62,62 … 248 (please correct me if I got the numbers wrong)."
From quotegeek:
Raymond: 82, 82, 82. Charlie: 82 what? Raymond: Toothpicks. Charlie: There’s a lot more than 82 toothpicks, Ray. Raymond: 246 total. Charlie: How many? Sally Dibbs: 250. Charlie: Pretty close. Sally Dibbs: There’s four left in the box.
I have to say, it was this part more than anything else in the movie that ruined for me the credibility of the Raymond Babbitt character.
Because 82 isn't prime? I believe this skill (the ability to see large numbers, exactly, instantly) is either (1) not so rare, or (2) based explicitly on observations by Oliver Sacks of twin savants who were able to identify the number of matches dropped on the floor (possibly by prime factorization of the random skill) or (3) Oliver Sacks was mistaken. If you search for Oliver Sacks twin savants prime you'll find many articles on this. I just randomly read a one-page letter in J Autism Dev Disord from 2007, which quotes the Sacks essay (from The Man who Mistook his Wife for a Hat), and says they instantly ("in a fraction of a second") identified 111 matches dropped on the floor, and quotes Treffert 2007 for other instances of people apparently possessing this same skill. (Another quote of the essay reports that the twins said "37" three times, which doesn't appear consistent with "in a fraction of a second", unless, of course the fraction is > 1). I have no idea how credible any of this is, but I'm just not sure that the particular scene you cite should have (instantly :-) ruined the credibility of the character. There's a lot of scepticism about Sacks' claim that the twins could identify 12 and 20 digit primes "by sight" or by feel or by smell, although he confirmed their skill with 6 digit primes (instantaneous) and 10 digit primes (which apparently required more thought). The very fact that it took them longer to "recognize" larger numbers as primes makes me sceptical of the claim that there was something on the surface that allowed them to recognize the numbers as primes without doing any calculation. But, in any case, from my very sketchy reading, it seems that there's much less scepticism about the claim of visually identifying the exact number of matches (or toothpicks) on a floor.
_______________________________________________ math-fun mailing list math-fun@mailman.xmission.com https://mailman.xmission.com/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/math-fun