"who is Mr Paranormal?"
Hello Ms Z. Conceptually, Mr Paranormal is an explanatory anthropomorphism. The first question I would like to consider is, whether an explanation is called for.
When Mr G announced the rules for Round A, I envisaged we might have some fun. For the purposes of this post I would like to present an
imagined sequence of events. Let us imagine that Mr G would have reached across from his desk to the nearest bookshelf and taken out the first book which came to hand. For example,
The ISBN is 9781461374930.
Let us then imagine that he would have opened this book at random and selected the first word upon which his eye lit:
The word is 'parameterization' on page 19, line 8, word 3.
So, in this example, the two numbers which he would have multiplied together are 97814613749300190803 and 0111000001100001011100100110000101101101011001010111010001100101
0111001001101001011110100110000101110100011010010110111101101110 (base 2), which gives 14611498900249997356682144316044411105508199092393145435306.
So (remember, this is an imagined sequence of events) he would then have posted in the forum, saying that the number for Round A is 14611498900249997356682144316044411105508199092393145435306.
I would then have read Mr G's post, and pasted his number into wolfram alpha:
From the results of that I would choose the number beginning with '978' (hopefully there will be only one, as there is in this case) and paste it back into wolfram alpha, dividing it into the original number and requesting the result in base 16:
The result is 706172616d65746572697a6174696f6e, which I would finally paste into the conversion utility and request conversion from hex to text:
which gives the result 'parameterization'.
I would then hurry back to the forum, and the dialogue could have gone something like this:
Mr G: OK folks, ready get set go. For Round A the number is 14611498900249997356682144316044411105508199092393145435306
J4: Interesting. I guess 'parameterization'.
Mr G: Correct.
Well, as you all know, it didn't exactly happen like that. What went wrong is that Mr G, for Round A, not only chose a 3-letter word, but he went so far as to tell us in advance that it was a simple 3-letter word. I immediately felt that to correctly guess the word 'hat', given that we had been
told in advance that the word was only 3 letters, would be so darned unimpressive that I couldn't bring myself to do it. Therefore I had to choose another tack, as we have seen.
But my question now is this: what if Round A
had gone like I imagined it could? What would people think?
