who here is congenitally illogical?

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it would be funnier if they were both costumed as giant bananas

.....and what was the banana skin doing on the floor anyway? Why had no-one deposited it in the waste bin?

litterbugs are necessary for good slapstick comedy

I suspect people who are good at chess also as a bonus are good at solving problems in general.

According to the manga/anime Hikaru no go some peoples are able to memorise go games.

(Begin at 8m15s)

It doesn't work that way.


Me slipping on a banana peel = tragic.

YOU slipping on a banana peel = funny!

A third guy that we're both looking at slipping on a banana peel = twice as funny.

I do make the occasional lucky guess, but for the most part, I'm not logical. I'm far from that stereotype.


As for work memory... For the most part, my working memory is poorer than 7. It depends on what it is, but somewhere between 3 and 5 is a better general estimate.

That "the average person can only hold 7 items in working memory" figure is completely meaningless without specification of how much each unit contains. It could be 7 digits or 7 sentences, which would most likely require significantly different amounts of working memory.

I used to play Go.

Its very different from, but comparable to chess.

That was fun seeing an animie go game.

It isn't because what constitutes a unit depends on what a person already knows. A sentence might be a single unit if it's a famous quote somebody is already very familiar with or it might be several units (one for each word) if it's something they've never heard before or it might be just a couple of units if they can condense part of the sentence down to a single unit.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Magical_Number_Seven,_Plus_or_Minus_Two



The key here is "chunking". What each unit contains is going to be different for different people because people chunk according to their knowledge base.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chunking_(psychology)


A competitive chess player can likely chunk whole sequences of moves because the sequences repeat if you play often enough and many of the sequences even have names. But an infrequent player can only hold a single move as a unit of information rather than a chunked sequence.

Solving the OP's logic problem without writing a chart to keep track is way beyond what most people can hold in working memory. If you write a chart you only have to keep a couple facts in working memory at a time. Once you record them in the chart you can boot them out of working memory to make room for the next sentence worth of clues. But I suppose people who do these sorts of problems frequently can start to chunk the clues because there is probably a pattern that the problem creators follow that becomes apparent after multiple problems and that can be used to create chunks.

That makes it even more meaningless! The statement is supposed to apply to "most people," or the "average" person, but if we're grouping together people who chunk together information of wildly differing complexity, we aren't comparing their memories according to the same standard.