The first link takes me to the LA Times. I never did find the article about Amy. The second link was great. I also read the essay she wrote about "How She Got So Smart." I could identify with what she said. Grade school (K-8) was easy for me. Actually too easy. I was easily bored. I remember in many of my classes l spent a lot of time just looking out the window because in teaching the teachers would repeat what they were saying, rephrasing it to be only subtly different. The first time they did that, I'd tune out and look out the window, only listening with half an ear for when they moved on.

In high school, I thought home work was a waste of time, because I never got anything out of it, so I didn't do it or if I did, I did it in the class before where it was due. If my teacher was a decent lecturer I never needed to crack a book. If they weren't, I could skim the chapter in the book and find out what was needed without needing really read the whole thing.

Unlike Amy, I do have something like a photographic memory. When I need to remember something I've read, I stare off into space and mentally skim what I've read. I've been known to say that I'm a wealth of worthless information and that none of it is likely to earn me a dime. As Amy says, knowledge is its own reward. Knowing something for the sake of knowing it is satisfying.

My example came from my father. He dropped out of school in the ninth grade. He told me it was because they began to teach him worthless information, like negative numbers. He said he just couldn't see where anyone would need negative numbers. In his day, he could get a job that payed as good as any mans job at age 14 so he went to work. However with that handicap, he was well read and could debate nearly any subject with the more academically gifted. When he came up with something he didn't know, all he had to do is pick up a book, skim through it cherry picking the topic for the specific point he needed and then put the knowledge in to practice producing results rivaling the experts. I picked that up from him.

In years past, I watched Jeopardy all most religiously. In watching it for a time I began to see that in many cases the "Answer" defined the question you needed to ask. Because of that you really didn't need to know anything about the subject, but only, as Amy put it, how to untangle the syntax to understand what was needed and once you did that the answer was obvious.

I don't mean to take anything away from Amy. What she is achieving on Jeopardy is a great thing and having bits and pieces of knowledge is the key, but more importantly, being able to string them together coherently requires a fair amount of intelligence. I'd say that her IQ is well into the genius rang. The way she described learning and retaining facts speaks of that. IQ, after all, isn't really worth anything if you never have the opertunity or the need to figure things out. A high IQ is a measure of how well you use the knowledge you have. Often a person with a high IQ can take a little bit of knowledge and extrapolate it to reach an answer that the knowledge would not, in itself, be enough to get there. Amy can certainly do that.