Fuck AI

My favourite cheating story was when a friend was permitted to take a couple of revision cards of notes into her final exam (as much as you could fit on the cards — one dude took a microscope into his exam, but that is fairly common, apparently). My friend had a form of synaesthesia that meant that whenever she saw letters, she saw colours. Each letter (and number, I think) had its own distinctive colour.

So what she did was she wrote her notes in colour, allowing her to encode an entire additional layer of information. So let's say the letters in the word "carbon" appeared to her as being red, orange, yellow, green, blue and purple, then she could write the word oxygen with the "o" in red, the "x" in orange", the "y" in yellow etc., and end up with something that a normal person would read as "oxygen", but she would be able to read it as "oxygen" and "carbon" simultaneously. Apparently it took work to be able to efficiently read two layers of information at once (or to focus on one layer and not be distracted by the other), but she started playing around with this back in highschool. She told me that the hardest part of this process was finding some coloured fineliners that were precisely the right colour for each letter.

However, she found that she was unsatisfied with the amount of extra information she was able to encode in this way. So instead, she broke down each letter into multiple chunks. So if she wrote the letter "o" in "oxygen" using 3 different colours (red, orange and yellow", and the "x" with "green, blue, purple", then she has managed to encode the entire word "carbon" into the space of only two letters. In the end, I think she was able to encode 6-8 times the information density into her permitted notes.

But the most funny thing about this is that producing these notes took so much effort and focus that she accidentally learned the content so well she didn't even need the notes. Task failed successfully, I guess? (If the task was writing some useful notes using this weird brain quirk or hers). She was salty at first at the wasted effort of making the notes, but I think she was glad to get to have such an absurd project

I can't imagine what it must be like to perceive the world like that. It really cooks my brain. I remember I once wrote down a word in regular black ink, and asked her what colours it appeared as. Then I wrote down the same word but in red ink, and asked her if she could tell that it was red, and whether she could simultaneously still see the same colours as before. She told me that yes, she could, and honestly, my mind is blown anew every time I think of this.

Gosh, that was longer than I expected. It was fun to write though. I hope at least one person finds it fun to read too.