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The following archive was created by hippie-mail 7.98617-22 on Fri Aug 21 1998 - 17:16:52 ADT
Andreas Bogk (andreas@artcom.de)
06 Apr 1998 20:12:43 +0200
Peter Wayner <pcw@access.digex.net> writes:
> Autistics are often known to have the strange ability to simply
> "see" the right answer to a complicated math problem. They just
> look at a long multiplication and "see" the right result. Has
> anyone done a study on whether they can be taught to "see" the
> answer to intractable problems in math like the inverse
> logarhythm, number factoring or some NP-complete problems like
> 3SAT? If they could do this, then someone could break RSA with
> access to the public key.
I have a book called "The man who confounded his wife for his hat". It
describes among other cases a pair of autistic twins, whose favourite
pastime was generating prime numbers in their heads and telling each
other. They said that they could see a pattern that prime numbers were
forming.
If I remember correctly, these numbers were between 10 and 20 decimal
places.
Other autistics are known for being able to calculate the day of the
week for every date in no time. Both problems are strongly connected
to modulo arithmetics, which again translates into patterns in some
way (see Knuths pictures of PRNGs).
Andreas
-- The obvious mathematical breakthrough [to break modern encryption] would be development of an easy way to factor large prime numbers.-- Bill Gates from "The Road Ahead," p. 265.
The following archive was created by hippie-mail 7.98617-22 on Fri Aug 21 1998 - 17:16:52 ADT