A popular talent show in China has stirred up heated online debate after a mentally challenged participant’s demonstration of superb arithmetic ability elicited doubts.
The heavyweight show, which aims to find and showcase the disguised intellectual talents of the grassroots community, dubbed Zhou the “Chinese Rain Man” after the Oscar-winning film starring Dustin Hoffman as an autistic savant. The show instantly created a buzz on China’s online community, with many online users apparently amazed by his extraordinary maths skills.
However, some sceptics emerged online to say they were unconvinced about the supposed talent Zhou demonstrated on stage. They suspected he had used memorisation and some memory techniques to arrive at the answer instead of going through the entire calculating process in his head.
They pointed out that the 14th root of any 16-digit number could only fall between 11 and 13. Even if he included an answer to the first decimal point there would just be 22 different possibilities. So as long as the challenge was limited to calculating the 14th root of 16-digit number, it would not be remotely difficult for any ordinary man if he could master the short-cut technique to come up with the right answer.