Donald Trump’s recent assertion - that he had a higher IQ than Secretary of State Rex Tillerson - got one group of software developers wondering – just how high is that? Having drunk a couple of tins too many and spent a day arguing over theorems that might prove Heaven is hotter than Hell, Ezon Fyre of E Cripes Inc. and his software development team were in the mood for more of their unique brand of speculative analysis. The question was: where to start?
They started by researching Donald Trump. A quick flick through Google revealed:
He thought more people attend his inauguration than any other president’s.
He fired the head of the FBI but the agreed upon story for why he did so was beyond his powers of recall, so he blagged it and revealed it was because the guy wouldn’t be his toady.
Despite hard evidence to the contrary, he was convinced his predecessor was born in Kenya.
He thinks white supremacists and people who are not white supremacists have equally valid viewpoints, and some white supremacists are very fine people.
He tweets like a covfefe – referencing a terrorist attack in Sweden when no such incident occurred, and a load of junk about London terror attacks, causing many Londoners to conclude that the term ‘moron’ flatters his true level of intelligence.
He said he could repeal and replace ObamaCare so easily it would be done on day one.
He wants to build a wall, has no idea how much the wall will cost, seems to think Mexico will pay for it (they won’t), still has no wall, and may end up building the world’s most expensive and pointless wall since it will leave whopping great gaps to the territory it is trying to ring fence.
Despite every investigation proving it is nonsense, he insists his predecessor wire-tapped Trump Towers, rants repeatedly that there would be no point in doing so, and thus thinks US intelligence services have nothing better to do than waste their time listening to his conspiracy theories while parked outside in a van.
He claimed to have signed more bills into legislation than any other president.
He considers himself more humble than you, or anyone like you, could possibly imagine, when he is obviously as vain as a red-arsed baboon on heat.
Yet more insane, inane nonsense.
The guys outlined the problems they faced to this reporter, and they were formidable. Finding a starting point for IQ measurement seemed impossible. The above are simple indicators of various mental disorders but none give a basis for the measurement of intelligence. A genius or a moron could have said these things.
Then someone on the team came up with a stroke of genius, one that nobody else had hitherto considered. What if The Donald actually believed the things he said? What if he thought he was speaking the truth and being wise? Wow! ‘It was like one of those moments when you realise the girl smiling at you across the room is actually smiling at you, not the guy behind you,’ said a member of the team who asked to remain anonymous on the grounds that he works for Anonymous.
Ezon’s rattlesnake-kissing uncle Josiah, who won’t believe anything “if it aint writ in the bible” and insists the world was literally made in seven days, gave the team a benchmark. Overlaying mad Josiah’s dumb-as-a-rock beliefs with some of Trump’s pronouncements gave rise to the following equation: refusing to believe in hard evidence while expressing a willingness to believe Fox News gives a human mind the IQ of a bird-brained seven-year-old.
This was a start but more analytical thinking was required. The team got creative and produced other theories, like: the inability to tell from photographs that one crowd of people is significantly smaller than another reveals a knowledge of perspective and scale in keeping with the mental acumen of a three-year-old with Attention Deficit Disorder on a sugar high.
And so the team continued, formulating rules deep into the night, taking Donald’s statements not as deliberate fibs designed to slay legions of faerie folk but as things he actually believed to be true. By the end the guys had a program design, albeit one that suggested the final computer-generated score would match the IQ of a tail-chasing puppy running repeatedly into a wall.
The guys knew that if they could turn their theories into logic and put them into a computer program with the set of ‘facts’ sourced directly from Trump’s Twitter account, they could start to extrapolate for Tillerson. Tillerson they decided would be set at ten percent below the computer generated score, based on the fact he declared Trump to be a moron but then wasn’t smart enough to say why (when surely the reasons are obvious). This might sound like unscientific guesswork but it was based on Uncle Josiah’s wife, who by all accounts had to be twice as stupid as her husband for marrying him in the first place (or so her parents said anyway). Tillerson was tied to Trump but at least had the good sense not to marry him.
Ezon Fyre and top code warrior Bob KDR Lazenby got straight into pair-programming mode. They bashed those keys but just could not identify a number low enough to equate to a living mind capable of independent thought that showed genuine belief in Trump’s statements. They were stuck at a level only madness could explain.
As Bob told our reporter: “Trump sets a baseline so low we didn’t know where to start. Ezon was steaming man, jus’ steaming. I thought he was going to break somethin’ or somethin’ like that. He jus’ kept swearing that Tillerson was right - Trump is a f*****g moron! It was about an hour later when I had given up, and was chillin’, kicking butt with the clan in COD WWII that I said again: we know he’s a moron, possibly the biggest moron ever. If we start from there we only have to work out how dumb Tillerson must be for Trump to have a higher IQ than him. It was just one of those questions y’know, the kind we like to wrestle with, like: if you made flies watch TV, would they prefer ER to The Simpsons, and why? Ezon doesn’t like questions like that going unanswered, no matter how hard, so we bustled up the crew, got Busy With EZ as we like to say, and around about four o’clock the next morning we had killed the question. Man, it was D-E-A-D.”
A software industry expert told us that “although it may mean little to the uninitiated, what was particularly impressive about this feat of IQ calibration is that it took less than four hundred lines of code.” As Bob further elaborated: “We were going nowhere in C Sharp, Java, C++; any of that crap. Then ol’ Wakky Baccy, who we’d brought in to help on the problem (Isiumo Nwakatome, a Software Developer based in North Korea and best known for his work encrypting files on other people’s computers and decrypting them for Bitcoin), suggested we get ol’ style on its ass and mash it all up as a genetic algorithm based on neural networks written in Fortran.” (nope me neither).
“I tell you, that was a work of genius!” said a sleepy Ezon when we managed to catch up with him after he had ‘Force Crashed’ on encountering daylight. I didn’t understand enough of the rest of his ramblings to record it for posterity but it was so dull to listen to I thought I’d have to resort to self-harm.
In case you’re wondering, the calculations reveal that the closest thing to an IQ lower than Donald Trump is a bag of hammers. The IQ of a bag of hammers is roughly 2.7, which is on a par with a man who does nothing in life but bang his head against hard, resistant objects, or try to negotiate diplomatic solutions while his boss is screaming at his counterpart “Come and get it you faggot bastard, c’mon if you think you’re hard enough!”
We have no definitive proof, but Ezon says the algorithm errs on the generous side. His assertion is that if properly calibrated, using Trump’s twitter feed as a reliable data source, the only way Tillerson could register an IQ score at all was if Brownian motion applied to number scales and somehow nudged him above zero.
Knowing how many haters there are in the world today we didn’t just take Ezon at his word. Given access to what the team called: The Trumpedup Beliefs Baseline code, every expert we brought in to validate the logic concurred with Ezon’s assessment. Most called it “harsh, but fair”.
Ezon, Bob and the crew will be posting The Tillerson Experiment – A Genetic Algorithm on Bayesian Inference of the IQ of Nearly Inanimate Living Objects, parts I – IV. This will be on the tech ninja boards just as soon as they can restart the servers that unfortunately crashed in the interests of great science.