Who Wants To Be a Cognitive Neuroscientist Millionaire? 65
ThePolynomial writes "Last night Ogi Ogas, a cognitive neuroscientist and Homeland Security Fellow, became the first person to face the million-dollar question on Who Wants to Be a Millionaire? in three years. He now has a first-person narrative on seedmagazine.com where he describes using techniques from cognitive science to think of answers on the show." From the article: "I used priming on my $16,000 question: 'This past spring, which country first published inflammatory cartoons of the prophet Mohammed?' I did not know the answer. But I did know I had a long conversation with my friend Gena about the cartoons. So I chatted with Meredith about Gena. I tried to remember where we discussed the cartoons and the way Gena flutters his hands. As I pictured how he rolls his eyes to express disdain, Gena's remark popped into my mind: 'What else would you expect from Denmark?'"
Dun dun dundun da da da daaa! (Score:4, Funny)
Dammit, Dammit, Dammit!
Re: wow (Score:1, Funny)
They were just playing the home game at Regis' place.
Uh (Score:2, Interesting)
It seems strage to see that show name in relation to anything even near science, considering that science was chucked from the roster of questions asked on it years ago.
Re: (Score:1, Insightful)
Judging from this question, "This past spring, which country first published inflammatory cartoons of the prophet Mohammed?", it seems they do ask questions other than pop culture, unless you count political current events as "pop culture".
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All the time in the world (Score:5, Interesting)
But, being TV, they can edit it down to make it entertaining. TFA mentions this, but not everyone is going to RTFA.
Isn't this how those memory guys do it? (Score:2)
Wonder how that could be applied to computer memory...
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but do they get a discount if they also have a coke and fries?
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I think (or would hope) that everyone uses these cognitive thinking methods whether they know it or not. I immediately recognize that I use all of the techniques he mentioned, but I didn't know there were formal names for it. I simply call it "putting it into context." If you can picture or associate something with something else, then you have a much higher chance that triggering any of those memories will fire off the entire c
Re: (Score:2)
I believe that if we create an AI that has a memory which is working in exactly the same way as ours, with exactly the same mechanism for remembering and/or forgetting things, that we could teach the AI these mnemotic tecniques, just like we can learn them ourselves. Apart from that, it's not applicable.
I saw this last night ! (Score:5, Interesting)
Horrible Article (Score:1, Funny)
The question is... (Score:2)
either way, it is awsome to see a scientific aproach to problemsolving
Bayer Heroin (Score:2)
So Ogi-dude does not know the answer, and he is trying to Zen this one while his wife, the medical doctor who must have known the answer, is squirming like crazy.
Geez, isn't it "knowl
RE: not correct (Score:3, Interesting)
Hmm, maybe that's why the summary says he was the first to face the million dollar question in three years?
--Atlantix
Priming (Score:5, Insightful)
The "Meredith Fake" (Score:5, Informative)
I got to visit New York several years ago for a chance to beat Regis, back when the show was still prime time.
One thing the producers hammered into our head was "Regis does not know the answer. He might think he does." The point: ignore the Regis Fake. He probably wants you to win but you might know more than he does.
They also told us that one contestant took about 45 minutes to answer a single question, got it right, and took another 45 minutes on the next one. As another poster said, they're fine with that. It all comes out in the editing.
Did better than this guy... (Score:5, Funny)
Gena's mental state (Score:1, Offtopic)
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Yeah, maybe, but then Gena would have an excuse for being... well, what he/she is.
Seems like winning makes right (Score:5, Insightful)
So what (Score:4, Insightful)
Frankly, the people who do those memory competitions are far more impressive than this guy, but at least they don't write 4 page essays on how clever they think they were.
Maybe I'm Insane... (Score:2, Interesting)
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Said Mr. I-don't-have-half-a-million-dollars
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LK
Who Wants to be a Millionaire.... (Score:1)
The modern version is so dumbed down, that it resembles the equally silly descendant of another show where the hostess would skewer the unfortunate soul who failed to answer correctly. Those were the
Interesting read. (Score:1)
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Man, I bet you try to work that line in to as many conversations as you can (I certainly would).
techniques (Score:5, Interesting)
I read the article, and it was more of a discussion of how your brain works, remembering long-forgotten and "unimportant" facts. It's more of a "what happens" discussion rather than a how-to guide. However, by having a better understanding of his thought processes, he was able to guide it a little better. I found the article interesting, because some of the techniques he used are the same ones I've employed playing trivia games or taking tests, and I just didn't know they had names.
For instance, I was unaware that "Theory of Mind" was a cognitive process with a name. Apparently, this is the process of understanding someone else's beliefs or thought processes and using this understanding to come to conclusions about their motives. The author used this process to eliminate some of the options given to him by asking himself "what would the question's authors have put here to confuse me" rather than just figuring out the correct answer to the question.
It reminds me of when I was in high school, and we were engaged in a county-wide "math field day" event. Students from several schools were brought together, and we took exams and competed for awards. One of the exams was almost impossible to complete, because it had 60+ questions, and you only had 30 minutes. The questions were not particularly hard, just time-consuming. After only being able to get through 5 questions in 10 minutes, I knew I wouldn't finish, so I started ignoring the questions, and just looked at the multiple-choice answers, and I realized what the authors were doing. They were trying to make answers that seemed plausible, or that you might arrive at if you made a mistake, by breaking up parts of the real answer. For instance, the choices you were given might be a) 2, b) 2/3, c) 2/5, d) 4/3, e) 4/7. It can't be a) 2, because the rest of the choices are fractions. Since three of the choices have a 2 in them, though, it's likely one of the answers with a 2. Since no other number but 3 and 4 appear more than once, it's likely an answer that has a 2 in it, and also a 3 or 4. The only answer that fits is b) 2/3. So I'd mark that down. I just did that for all the questions, and won the competition, without actually doing any math.
Meta-memory (Score:2)
Another cool millionaire (Score:2)
Ahem... *cough* *cough* (Score:1)
Gena sounds like a dick (Score:3, Informative)
Intuition seems like a bogus excuse (Score:2)
I'm sure the techniques have some basis to why they work, but it is easy to fit the model to the data when you turned out to be right. Why don't we ask every person who d
Smart is good, but Knowledge is useful too (Score:2)
Surely someone employed in Homeland Security should be au fait with current affairs ? The Danish cartoons were big news for well over a week not that long ago, and are obviously related to questions of terrorism and, well, Homeland Security. Obviously the qualifications for winning a quiz show are more stringent than landing a job with Homeland Security.
Re:'What else would you expect from Denmark?' (Score:1)
Take it from a dane (and even in the words of a marginally Danish influenced band, whose name I fear to mention as their Danish member might sue the crap out of me)... It's "Sad But True"...
I know it's wildly off-topic, so feel free to mod me so, but there's still a lot of this going on here - it didn't stop with the cartoons last year. Within the past few months a radical right-wing party realeased a drawing of Mohammad as a drooling pedophile in their members' magazine and the same party's youth fraction
Denmark has gotten a free ride for far too long! (Score:2)
Re:techniques (Score:2)
That's brilliant. I've done the same myself thinking back, but I don't think I was as systematics as that. I like the thinking.
Re:Another cool millionaire (Score:1, Offtopic)
That dude was ICE COLD.
I loved the fact that he needed NO lifelines, and he use the phone a friend to call his dad and tell him he was going to win.
Not to mention he worked for the IRS, and probly kept a better share of the $1M than most people.
Just pre-guess random answers (Score:3, Funny)
a,b,a,a,d,c,b,a,c,b,d,b,d,c,b - did I win? It's only a 1 in 4^15 chance (is my maths working?). Hmm. That's a billion. Might take a while to do it. But brute-forcing it will work.
Re: Who wants to piss off the entire nation? (Score:2)
People who take an ungodly amount of time to answer simple questions are among the most annoying people on the planet.
No kidding. These are the same people who make me spend all three hours proctoring a final exam, even though they do nothing but flip through the pages, nibble their pencil, sigh, look around the room, and don't actually answer any questions for the last 45 minutes of it.
Still don't know the answer to the question..... (Score:2, Interesting)
You still don't know the answer, chump! It so happens Denmark wasn't the first to publish such cartoons, and they didn't publish cartoons in the plural, but only one cartoon - ergo, not a very well-informed cognitive scientist - do not look to this clown for future scientific advances in the field of cognitive neuroscience. What America - and a number of other countries need - is m
Re: not correct (Score:3, Insightful)
that is a horribly phrased sentence. The editors should have corrected it to read:
Last night Ogi Ogas, a cognitive neuroscientist and Homeland Security Fellow, became
the first person in three years to face the million-dollar question on 'Who Wants to
Be a Millionaire?'
fsck, this is like using digg. Make with the 24 bit ints and threaded comments!
Special cognitive science techniques (Score:4, Insightful)
-dZ.
Advanced learning (Score:1)
You want to know how they built the pyramids? Consider this: They had the best education system (as in method of learning) the world has ever known.
Crudely it can be analogised thusly. If you have a ring on your finger, or a necklace, broach, locket, special pen someone gave you etc... Then to anyone else, if they look at that ring, it will be a meaningless piece of metal to them. Zero value sentimentally. However,
Who wants to be a millionaire got it wrong (Score:2)
2: I don't know why anybody would expect this more or less from Denmark
3: The cartoons were published in November 2005, but didn't gain any momentum internationally until a group of extremist imams (muslim priests) went to Egypt with a portfolio of the drawings, as well as a lot of other nasty stuff that may or may not have been presented to these guys, but never, never, never was printed in any significant publication.
It was obvious what they meant, and since he got it right, he probably doesn
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