No. I dont sit around studying your tests. I find them breathtakingly stupid and meaningless. So I just kept getting more and more pissed off. In the end I was trying to qualify as a possibly homicidal lunatic.

You werent concerned about being confined?

I was confined.

You didnt find anything interesting about the Minnesota test.

No.

You scored ninety-six on the Stanford-Binet.

I was trying to score a hundred.

Why?

Because that’s what you’re supposed to score.

What is your actual IQ?

I dont have one.

This is not a form of hubris? Being untestable?

Not if you’re not. Anyway, the Stanford-Binet is racist. Among other things.

How can it be racist?

There are no questions about music on the test. For instance. Apparently music doesnt count. So here’s a black guy with a measured IQ of eighty-five who is by any metric you might care to choose a musical genius. Simply off the charts. But to the IQ folks he’s little more than a halfwit.

I suppose you think the test-people themselves are not all that bright.

I’ve never met anyone in this business who had any grasp at all of mathematics. And intelligence is numbers. It’s not words. Words are things we’ve made up. Mathematics is not. The math and logic questions on the IQ tests are a joke.

How did it get that way? Intelligence as numerical.

Maybe it always was. Or maybe we actually got there by counting. For a million years before the first word was ever said. If you want an IQ of over a hundred and fifty you’d better be good with numbers.

I would think it would be difficult for someone to assemble the responses which you did on some of these tests without being familiar with the test.

I’d had a certain amount of practice. I had to make A’s in the humanities in college without reading the idiotic material assigned.

You wouldnt read the material on principle?

No. I just didnt have time.

Why didnt you have time?

Because I was doing math eighteen hours a day.

Some people would say that’s not possible.

Yes. They would.

What about scale eight?

I dont know what that is.

Well, among other things it’s designed to test for schizophrenia.

Yeah? How’d I do?

You squeaked past. So if you were manipulating the test might it not mean you were schizoid and somehow managed to lie about it? Of course the test is also designed to pick up head trauma and epilepsy.

I was dropped on my head as a child.

Is that true?

No.

All this math you were doing. It cant have all been assigned material.

None of it was assigned material.

What was it that interested you most?

I spent a certain amount of time on game theory. There’s something seductive about it. Von Neumann got caught up in it. Maybe that’s not the right term. But I think I finally began to see that it promised explanations it wasnt capable of supplying. It really is game theory. It’s not something else. Conway or no Conway. Everything that you start out with is a tool, but your hope is that it actually comprises a theory.