Another example is DHH who created RoR eventually became professional sport car racer.
It's well know that in sports area, many top players have the talent. My guess is it's also applicable on "mind sports".
It’s a statistical measure comparing the test taker against the average, much like percentiles.
At a certain IQ score, somewhere in the 170’s I think, the expected number of individuals with that IQ is about 1.
If we had absolute measures of intelligence (that would be a breakthrough for the ages), then we could say “A is twice as smart as B” and award A twice the points of B. In such a system, the sky is the limit for the number of points.
EDIT: If/when we build a human-level AI, perhaps we could use the number of transistors / artificial neurons involved as a proxy for an absolute measure of how difficult it is to answer some problems. This would be imperfect but better than nothing.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/68%E2%80%9395%E2%80%9399.7_rul...
A quick googling gives estimates of ~117B humans have ever been born.
So if you were the cleverest person on the planet, ever, you'd have 1-in-117B intelligence?
Also, I'm wondering whether a difference of 1 IQ point is even noticeable, and if not, what's the smallest noticeable increment or faction of a unit.
It would be handy to have standardized test answers from every human ever, but sadly most are dead as you point out.
IQ is standardised so that population scores on a standard test have a mean of 100 and standard deviation of 15. It's possible to obtain this with as fewer than 100 people, distributed as:
* One "genius" who scores 200
* One "dumbass" who scores 0
* 87 "everyman" who score 100.
The mean here is clearly 100, and the variance is sqrt(20000/89) = 14.99.
Of course this is very contrived and doesn't look much like a Bell curve in the first place. But with say a million people it wouldn't take much to come up with a more realistic looking example.
Wouldn't that be roughly equivalent to equating brain size/volume to intelligence? I know there's a decent correlation between intelligence and head-size, but it's not that consistent. Some brains just work better for their size.