
Shakuntala Devi – The Human Computer (2016) - bryanrasmussen
https://petersmagnusson.org/2016/01/15/shakuntala-devi-the-human-computer/
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JdeBP
> 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.

~~~
prashnts
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...](http://sriramanavidyalaya.school/assets/files/More%20Puzzles%20to%20Puzzle%20You.pdf))

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. :)

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JdeBP
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/](https://snopes.com/fact-check/the-unsolvable-math-problem/)

~~~
prashnts
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.

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

~~~
billfruit
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.

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

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person_of_color
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?

~~~
prashnts
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](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24295270)

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dang
If curious see also

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

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visarga
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?

~~~
person_of_color
This will go all the way upto AGI.

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tuckfrump666
maybe we are living in a simulation and that's just how the matrix glitches to
fk with us

~~~
skapadia
Absolutely this.

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abinaya_rl
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."

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blackoil
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.

~~~
thewhitetulip
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

~~~
mayankkaizen
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.

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

