...And On Intuition.

Right, this is a third post "On" topics. Intuition be the theme for today (tomorrow? yesterday's day after tomorrow?)

We all possess this amazing skill called intuition. Perhaps it evolved out of our primal instincts; a self-defense mechanism in fight or flight scenarios; a tendency to predict the future. Pick your reason from these and more, many have been forwarded as to how this peculiar sense works. I'm not so concerned about the mechanics of it, but more of the applications we put it to use in.

Gambling, I'm sure, is a "sport" that encourages, indeed revolves around the house taking advantage of players' misguided intuition. Intuition can spectacularly fail where numbers are concerned, giving one false odds and impressions. Take for example the chance of rolling 2 dice and getting a 12. People will reason "2-12 are possible; ten numbers, so there's a 1 in 10 chance of rolling a 12." Of course, this is a rather unsophisticated example; more elegant and subtle methods are employed by casinos. If for nothing else, I respect casinos for their eloquent execution of probabilistic mathematics.

Speaking of maths, here is a double-edged zone where intuition can help, or fall apart completely. In regular maths tests, it is fairly easy to guess all the MCQ answers from 4 options. Intuition can be applied liberally here to choose the most correct-seeming, non crap answer like "2+2 = 4" rather than "2 + 2 = 5^42/89.17". Don't laugh, this sort of thing happens. Maths competitions, on the other hand, screw up my brain totally. Due to circumstances requiring me to appear pro in math, I go for competitions to check my standard. And here is where intuition falls flat on my face, since all the questions appear to give insufficient information to solve (geometry anyone?) or seem obvious but have no short proof like the unacceptable common sense. Intuition is rendered helpless by the high-level questions.

Note, though, that intuition usually doesn't desert me like this; in regular schoolwork I can probably keep up through a combination of guesswork, short-term memory and a healthy dose of instinct. The correct answers just speak to me. In long open-ended questions, the correct method yells itself hoarse. In essay questions, points flow into my head while writing. Not good for Literature, but OK for everything else. The best thing is it's inexplicable, so I AM telling the truth when I say I don't know how I can even pass tests, let alone score well in them.

Luck is another thing related to this. I once won a scissors-paper-stone match, 5 out of 6 with one draw. Moving pieces like I had no idea what I was doing (I didn't) in a chess tournament and drew... twice like this. Guessing the correct answer to an open-ended maths question by flipping a coin. A wallet, actually, but same difference. Luck combined with intuition works wonders; My old eraser could be used to tell fortunes (and guess correct answers in tests.)

The bottom line? Intuition is weird, wacky and wonderously wicked at whacking randomly at wanted answers when wished for. I hope this holds true in the competition-level geometry test next. Waaaargh.