APPLAUSE AND CHEERING
Welcome to tonight's Ql, where
we'll be looking at ticks, tax and toes in the company
of the ticklish Rose Matafeo...
APPLAUSE AND CHEERING
...the tactile Ross Noble...
APPLAUSE AND CHEERING
...the TOE-tally transcendent Lou Sanders...
APPLAUSE AND CHEERING
...and the tax-deductible Alan Davies.
APPLAUSE AND CHEERING
And, for their buzzers, Rose goes...
MUSIC: Tick Tock by Clean Bandit
# Tick tock, tick tock... #
Ross goes...
MUSIC: Sunny Afternoon by The Kinks
# The tax man's taken all my dough... #
Lou goes...
MUSIC: Love ls All Around by The Troggs
# I feel it in my fingers, I feel it in my toes... #
And Alan goes...
MUSIC: Tiptoe Through The Tulips by Tiny Tim
# Tiptoe through the tulips with me... #
Wow. Wow.
Was that Tiny Tim? It WAS Tiny Tim.
And, yes, I do look exactly like him.
I don't know why I turned to you in that moment, I'm so sorry.
Right, I'm going to start with question one.
Why might a Parisian taxi ride be electrifying?
So it was an experiment in Paris... With electricity.
...with electricity. And taxis? Were taxis involved?
Yes. Nothing gets past you. No.
They've got the flying ones, haven't they? They're talking about bringing them in.
The heck?! The huh!
Yay! Whoa!
You're talking about flying taxis?! Yeah.
The French are developing flying taxis.
What? Sorry.
No, it's just like some sort of circus thing.
Hey, hey, hey, HEY!
That's how I do all my thinking.
Hup! Here it comes!
First time anyone else has actually done it to help me into the
"hup, hup!" It's in! Right, now, go!
If you just shout "the heck?!" every now and then...
The heck?! The heck! Hup! ..he'll be off.
1987, they decided to experiment in Paris,
so they had a number of passengers who maybe didn't behave very well
or a bit rude or whatever.
Zap them?! Yes.
An electrified seat.
GASPING AND GROANING
Wow. Nonfatal!
They said.
To be fair, it's in the rudest city in the world. Yeah. Yeah.
So it's operated by a foot pedal in front of the driver's seat.
The idea was to protect... You'd never stop, would you?!
Just holding it down!
See them in the mirror.
But you need one the other way around so that when they start
being a bit racist, "The thing about the foreigners..."
That guy, he was the head of the taxi union
and he's showing off one of these things.
And apparently the drivers said it would be perfectly safe
and they could tell if somebody was going to be violent
cos they could see it in their expressions.
OK, so the seats were 52,000 volts.
Yeah, that is slightly more powerful than a police stun gun,
which is sort of 40 to 50,000 volts
and, weirdly, eventually banned.
What it means is, on the second-hand market, some of them taxis
are still knocking about.
Yeah. Yes, please. Yeah.
I'll have one of them. Pick up your mother.
When you haven't got a passenger in the back,
bit of cheese, bit of baguette.
Chuck it in the back.
Croque monsieur!
Thank you very much.
Sorry. Can I just say - the heck?!
Yeah.
The heck?! Hick-hick, hickety-hock!
That's a great idea, Ross. jeez Louise.
CHEESE Louise. CHEESE Louise!
That's LIKE a croque monsieur.
Could I have a cheese Louise?
That's a Peugeot. What's a Peugeot? On the left there,
that's a Peugeot.
I was overlooked for Top Gear.
In favour of three total idiots.
So one of the things I love about the whole subject about taxis
in Paris is the women who drove the taxis. From 1907, the first
coach women appeared.
This is horse-drawn. And the two first women to become coach women,
Clementine Dufaut and Eugenie Charnier,
there was a huge crowd.
They thought it was so exciting.
Here's the sort of downside of it.
The female drivers were often heckled,
and the heckle that they used to get is "et les chaussettes?"
Anybody know what it means? She's a shoe.
LAUGHTER
What about the socks?
In other words, who's going to darn the socks
if you are driving a taxi?
Urgh, that's sexism, Sandi. I know.
It's shocking. just another example. Shocking. Yeah.
That's why you were overlooked for Sock...Top Gear.
Sock Gear?!
I love the sound of Sock Gear!
If you're going to make THAT show, I'm in.
We review different socks every week.
But look at this woman just darning a sock whilst being.
She's sewing it onto a horse's face.
This was a craze for postcards and newspaper cartoons depicting
the female cabbies or mostly satirising them, showing the women
that they couldn't control their horses or the women looking,
I don't know, overly sexualized or overly masculine. This man,
he's saying, "All women cab drivers - myself, when I'm bored,
"I spend an hour alone with a woman for 40 sous."
He looks lovely.
He looks a charm.
Everything about him, he seems gorgeous.
Wouldn't you have loved to be with him all lockdown?
Ancl on top of it all, he's bloody French.
See, Top Gear!
Lots of French postcards of the time showing women in male occupations
because it was thought to be so sort of amusing.
So you get women hanging up bill posters and that kind of thing.
There, look, like that.
QUIETLY: Is that a ladder or are they her legs?
I like how you whispered that as if she could hear you.
Might the other woman suddenly shoot up on her own version?!
You asked it gently, like "Women are a mystery".
Now, what noise is this clock making?
TICKI NG Tick-tock!
KLAXON, LAUGHTER
Is that wrong?! It is wrong. Yes. Oh.
So NO clock goes tick-tock.
It's actually just tick, tick, tick, tick. Oh. Oh!
But what we do is we automatically organise repeating sounds
into music. And generally, the brain gives the second note in a pair
a slightly lower tone. And so we put the emphasis on the first.
So we go tick-tock. But you can overrule this conditioning.
OK? So if you try and say
tick-TOCK-tick, tick-TOCK-tick aloud,
as you listen to the clock, you will gradually hear
the ticks become tocks. Now, look. What?
Clocks, they do...don't... It's not always the same sound
on the way there as the way back.
Wha-a-at? Are you talking about time machines?
That's what it is. Are you saying
a pendulum takes longer to come back one way?
No, I'm saying, I feel, I feel in my head... Yes.
...that a clock makes a tick and a tock sound - doesn't make the same
sound twice. It makes one sound one way, a different sound the other.
On the journey, it kind of changes
and it comes back a different person. Yeah.
Anyone else feel that way?
No-one! Shit!
What if you were eating Tic Tacs while you said it?
Would that change it? The truth is, most clocks go tick-tick,
but we want to hear it as tick-tock and we do this in changing vowels
all the time. So we have flip-flop, ping pong, mishmash,
tiptop. It's something that we do. Oh, right.
But what about bring-bring?
What is bring-bring? Bring-bring! Oh!
I thought it was like... No-one said "bring-brong"!
"I can't handle bring-bring!" I thought bring-bring was something
you said to the butler. Hey...!
Now I'm thinking of dick pic.
Ross, welcome to MY world.
On the phone - would you like me to send you a DICK-pic?
Pick-a-dick. Pick a dick for the dick pic!
It's basically a trick of the mind.
The same thing can happen with car indicator noises, that we think
that there are two different notes because we automatically try
and make it a little bit more musical than it actually is.
That also works if you're listening to The Prodigy.
What is The Prodigy?
LAUGHTER
It's a small child who plays a violin.
Yes. Quite a lot of posh people get a bit confused.
They turn up to a Prodigy gig, they're expecting,
"When is this young boy going to say, Smack My Bitch Up?"
So there's another clock-based trick of the mind.
What I want you to do is glance
at the second hand of an analogue clock as it's ticking, OK?
And there is an illusion, which is called the stopped-clock illusion,
that, when you glance at it, the very first tick,
as you look at it, seems to take a little bit longer than usual.
And it's a thing called chronostasis.
You know that thing, it's an old-fashioned thing,
but if you have the receiver in one ear and it's ringing... Bring-bring.
Bring-bring, of course. Bring-bring. Oh, now we all want bring-bring.
If you switch to the other ear, then for a brief moment,
you can hear silence. It's as if the phone has been answered,
and then the ringing starts again. There is no extra gap there,
it's just that that's what it feels like to us. Actually, the most...
You just...! I was just overwhelmed by the concept of time,
I think! It's just, it's all... Cos time is just made up, isn't it?
Well, OK.
What about when you go on holiday?
When you go on holiday... Yeah.
What seems to happen, if you're on holiday for two weeks.
Yeah. What seems to happen in the second week?
Everyone's hair gets slightly longer.
The second week, you sort of drop the offensive accent.
Ancl you've finished with the waiter, already.
You're sort of, you're clone with the waiter. Done with the waiter.
How do you get your food?
Well, no, he's not bringing you food.
Wow. So basically, time seems to be quicker on the second...
And that's because you're used to everything or used to where you are.
You see the inflatable just next to the steps there?
Only the Queen is allowed to ride on that.
He's actually been dropped from an aeroplane.
Doesn't it depend on how much you like your family?
When the time is quicker or slower?
Well, I mean, it sort of depends on whether you're being
overstimulated or not. Time apparently seems to slow down
on a person's first skydive,
by 36%". Really? ..because you're so overwhelmed by all the stimulus
that you're taking in, and it seems to make time slow down
for you. Here's the thing about skydiving, you know
when you pull the thing like that and you would think
that you go woosh up in the air.
But that's because when it's filmed, you go woomph like that,
and the camera person's there and it, whoosh, and they keep falling,
so you think that it's an up, but it's just a "oh!"
Can I just ask, have you ever been skydiving?
No, never. But...
I've never done it. But I did talk to a cameraman once.
Brave. Brave. Love that.
Yeah. I did it.
I strapped onto a bloke and he jumped out.
Why would you do that?
I mean, really, when I thought back,
I thought, I didn't even know him.
How did you know he could do it?
Well, he was offered up as, you know, the person you strap to.
Yeah. And I don't know.
I mean, he could have been in ANY sort of mood, couldn't he? I know.
Yeah, but to be fair, you were just strapped to him
for the whole holiday and he went,
"Shall we jump out of a plane?"
Yeah, we did a lot of activities.
But did time seem to stand still in that moment
that you launched yourself from the plane?
It was the most frightening thing even
Did you do it for charity or just for yourself?
I did it because I'd broken up with a girlfriend who told me
that her previous boyfriend was much braver than me!
Ancl cleverer and more...and funnier!
That was really wounding.
Ancl I thought, "I'm going to jump out of a plane. I'll show you."
Ancl they said, "Right, put your foot out on the wheel strut,"
and I absolutely shat myself.
If I hadn't been strapped to this fella,
I would never have gone.
And just be clear, as you shat yourself, was he behind you
or in front of you? He was behind.
He took it in his stride, Sandi.
Literally.
And did you land safely into your ex-girlfriend's wedding or...?
Right. How do you hide -
think carefully -
...17,000 swimming pools?
OK. I'm going to give you a clue.
LOU: I don't need one.
No. Oh!
I've got it, I've got it! No, no, everybody watch and learn. OK.
Well, what you do, Sandi...
17,000 blankets.
Well...camouflage might help.
Are we talking about aerial photography? Yes.
So in 2008, the Greek government -
famous for being able to collect taxes -
they decided to put a tax on swimming pools in Athens.
324 households checked the box on the form, to say,
"Yes, indeed, we have a pool."
So they looked at some satellite images of the city,
and they found 16,974!
And so there was a swimming pool builder in Athens,
and all he did was get requests from people saying,
"How can I hide my pool?"
So all kinds of things, blankets that mimicked grass, frankly,
floating tiles, camouflage nets, anything that they could think of.
Wow. So I was kind of right.
I think I'm going to give you a point, because I do think
you were sort of heading in the right direction. Thank you.
APPLAUSE
France has got the highest proportion of privately owned
swimming pools in Europe, and they're taxed there too.
How do you justify taxing a hole in the ground with water in it?
Yeah. "You've got a hole there, with water in, so that'll cost you."
You think this guy looks married?
I think not, I'm going to go...
That's my husband you're talking about!
So the swimming pool is considered a luxury tax.
And there was a time in history when being a bachelor was also
considered to be a luxury.
Yes! And single people should pay the government
for their failure to marry.
Damn! When might it have come up as a thought that maybe some
of those single men...?
Oh, is it just men, or women as well? It's men.
Women can do what they like. Is it to do with conscription?
It is around the war.
So we are talking about 1920.
It was seen as sinful, it was seen as not doing your duty after
the First World War, that bachelors were just having a good time.
Sandi, love is a war.
It is, the way YOU do it, Lou Sanders.
From what I've heard, it's more of a skirmish.
1920, a group of women in Perigueux, France,
formed the Anti Bachelor Society...
They could just marry them,
they don't need a society!
Get out there and marry some of these poor bastards!
The problem was there were so many casualties from World War I,
that there weren't enough men to go around.
And what these women demanded was that the bachelors
should pay extra tax,
they should be banned from voting, or holding public office.
- I love it. - I'm all for that. Yeah.
I have to say, it didn't quite work out, but the government
did introduce a 25% tax surcharge on unmarried men and women
over the age of 30, because they wanted to boost
the ageing population.
The English Parliament in 1695 passed the Marriage Duty Act,
which taxed bachelors over 25
in a bid to raise funds for war with France.
And I have to say, we're not the only country
that has had this discussion about a bachelor tax.
The United States, there was a big discussion about it.
It didn't actually happen,
but here's a cartoon suggesting
what would happen if this law came into effect.
But anyway, it has been common across lots of countries,
this idea that bachelors have some kind of duty to get married.
Up until, from the late 19th century until World War ll, Denmark
had a thing that women aged between 13 and 20 could take out
insurance against celibacy,
and if they were still unmarried at 40, then you got a pension
from your insurance policy.
Wow. Bring it back! Bring it back!
If you can disguise your swimming pool as a spouse, you've got
the ultimate tax dodge.
What's wrong with this creature?
It's not in my lap.
Does anybody know what it is?
It's an echidna. Yes!
Have you seen an echidna? Oh...
Not only have I seen echidnas, I'm obsessed with them.
Why obsessed with them? Well, cos they crawl about in my garden.
OK, let me get this out.
They're great.
Oh... No, the, er,
the echidna has...
I know you're going to get annoyed when I say this
because it's...
It's got four penises.
Not ANOTHER one!
He's got one penis. Yeah.
With four ends on.
Yeah. So, you know, take your pick.
So, like, eco, sport... Yes.
You're thinking of Cock Gear.
So they live in Australia and New Guinea, is where they live.
And they're a mammal, but they lay eggs.
Yeah, that's true. This is an extraordinary example of an echidna.
It dates back to 1828.
It's from the Grant Museum at UCL,
and it was lent to us by Tannis Davidson.
WHISPERS: Is it sleeping?
It's dead.
You started this question by saying what's wrong with it?
What's RIGHT with it is it's got four clicks.
But it's got four something else, which are wrong. Legs.
Yeah. In what way are they wrong?
They're facing the wrong direction. How do you know that?
Cos I'm guessing, Sandi, I'm guessing.
They've had to nail its feet down, to stop it flipping over
and giving you all four.
Is it that the toes should go that way?
Yes. So it's got its feet on back to front is the thing.
So they have what looked like backward feet
on their rear legs. So can you see the one on the right?
That is correct. OK?
It's to make predators think that they're going towards
them or something. It's like
when you paint a face on your bum.
It's to enable you to dig properly, so that you can scrape earth
out of the hole much more efficiently as you go downwards.
So the problem with this, clearly, the taxidermist had never seen
an echidna, OK? Oh! And it arrived, didn't know what it looked like,
and thought, "Well, those feet
"for a start, they must be on the wrong way around."
And it just put them where you'd think feet ought to go,
but it's completely back to front.
So, in those days, an exotic specimen would arrive,
you wouldn't have a photograph or whatever.
It would probably be pickled and it would be incomplete,
and the taxidermist's job is to put it back together and then stuff it.
And if you've never seen the animal before, you would have no idea
whatsoever how it ought to be displayed.
The most famous example of that is one of my favourites.
It's the Gripsholm Castle Lion in Stockholm.
Have you seen it? Yeah, it's amazing.
Yeah. Wow.
Yeah.
He was a present in the 1730s, to King Frederick I of Sweden.
But clearly, the guy who received the bundle of bones and whatever,
had never actually seen a lion!
What he's clone there, he's got the lenses from a pair of sunglasses.
I LOVE him. I love him.
And I have just discovered that Leo the Lion has his own Facebook page.
He has 7,500 followers. One more today.
And I found his last posting. It was from Christmas.
Have a look at this. This is a really pleasing thing.
AWw!
That is terrifying.
I think I'm becoming a fan of bad taxidermy.
This is a wonky ocelot, which I REALLY like.
Look at that!
Isn't that great? So the first one is from 1880.
The one on the left is 1880
and the second one, 1934.
I think they thought that didn't go so well, that first one.
There is a taxidermied blue whale
I have discovered for you. ALAN GASPS
Yes. I'm very excited about this. It's a juvenile,
it's not the full kind of size... Acceptable.
...but it's in a museum in Gothenburg.
It was caught in the 1860s.
And what they did was they took the skin off and they stretched it
over a frame. And to make it more attractive to visitors, OK,
they hinged the jaw, and you could go inside.
And that's just about 25 people having dinner,
on the left there! That picture on the right,
is that it breaking out?
Well... "I've had enough of this!"
They moved the museum, the Natural History Museum, to a new building,
and this was how they got the whale, the taxidermied whale out.
Surely if it's stuffed, you just let it out.
You just... Re-inflate it?
...schhhhloop it down and then...
I would have loved to have had dinner inside a whale.
Do you not think that's an amazing look? Does look quite good fun.
They stopped doing it in the 1930s, because they discovered a couple
having sex inside the whale. Ugh!
One couple spoils everything!
I know! Jonah and the moaner?
APPLAUSE
Anybody in the audience remember seeing stuffed dogs at train
stations with coin slots in them in order to collect money?
Put your hand up if you remember. At Wimbledon. Wimbledon.
Yeah. So they were real dogs that had been taxidermied
and then they had coin slots for donations either in their backs
or in their heads.
And it dates from a Victorian tradition, which I think lasted
until about the 1950s, that dogs, they were called charity dogs, used
to roam around British railway stations collecting for good causes
and they'd have a collection box on them.
And then some of them were stuffed after death so that they could
go on collecting. There's a very good example called
London jack, and London jack was a black dog, a flat-coated retriever,
but he went... That's him on the left there.
He'd gone blond in the sunlight and a taxidermist looked at him,
discovered he'd got dark roots,
so they re-dyed him on the...
Every woman will appreciate this can happen. This can happen...
There was a load of real Labradors that died
from getting coins jammed in their head.
I used to have a...
I had a stuffed otter, and...
LAUGHTER
It's not a euphemism, calm down!
So I was in Kilkenny, and I won some money on a horse
and I got this money.
I was walking past this sort of junk shop and I saw this stuffed art
and I thought, "Well, hang on, there's a stuffed otter,
"I have got some money. This is a match made in heaven."
So I got this otter, I spent three days just having fun with it
around Kilkenny, you know, playing pranks on people, that sort of thing.
And then I wanted to bring it back.
I was living in London at the time and I thought,
"Are you allowed to import animal products, that sort of thing?"
So I went to the police station and I walked in with it under my arm,
and there was an old Irish policeman sat there like that
and I said to him,
"I want to take this otter to London."
He went, "Oh, that'll be nice for him."
LAUGHTER AND APPLAUSE
Have you still got it?
No.
What happened to it?
It died. He went...
He returned to his homeland.
What? Did you return him to the sea?
No. If you must know, Sandi, my house burned down,
I lost everything I owned. But let's not mention that.
GROANING
Is that true? Yeah. Yeah.
And you know what?
I suspect the otter. Yeah!
LAUGHTER AND APPLAUSE
Now, what do elephants and ballerinas have in common?
Costumes. Look. Yes.
It's really unethical to ride either
of them for entertainment.
You shouldn't do it. If you go to the Royal Ballet
and try to ride one of the ballerinas,
only the Queen is allowed to ride the ones
from Swan Lake.
You nearly made it through there. I nearly did!
I started laughing before...!
You thought of the mental image of it.
I've got it. If they look at you in a certain way,
they're going to charge at you.
Is it to do with the laws of physics?
Oh! NOW this is interesting!
Is it to do with how unlikely it is that you could stand
on your toes...as elephants stand on things in circuses? You are heading
in the right direction, and it is to do with their toes.
Elephants naturally walk on their toes, which are positioned
at the front of their feet, but their heel bones
are off the ground.
And if we have a look at a drawing, they also have this large fatty pad
behind the toes, and that structure - so, toes in front
and the fatty pad behind - it gives them a longer step
and it enables them to spread out their massive weight.
It does put enormous pressure on their feet.
So if there's a hard surface, they often get very sore feet.
And the ballet tiptoe technique is something
that they have in common.
It actually first started in the early 19th century,
it was considered a stunt until a wonderful ballerina turned up,
called Marie Taglione.
And before that, ballerinas had stood on their toes
with the aid of wires. I'm sorry to give it away.
And she was just a superstar.
There was Taglione mania, there was cakes, hairstyles, dolls
named after her.
She was a kind of star that it's hard to imagine today.
And after her last performance, which was in Russia in 1842,
a group of ballet fans supposedly bought a pair of her shoes.
They had them fricasseed,
and they ate them, washed down with champagne!
Wow. Werner Herzog.
That's great. But here is a lesson about celebrity.
She could not have been more famous, more revered,
and she ended her life poor, giving deportment lessons in London.
Right, I want you to name a completely futile game.
Golf.
I played hide-and-seek on my own, once. That was quite futile.
AUDIENCE: Awww!
Were you seeking or hiding?
Sort of sat behind the sofa.
"I'm never going to find me here!"
Any thoughts, what might a futile game be in game theory?
One with no end, one with a middle?
A futile game is one, if both sides play it absolutely perfectly,
it will always result in a draw.
So the best example of that, what the Americans call tic-tac-toe,
but which we call noughts and crosses. Noughts and crosses.
So unless somebody makes a mistake...
Well, they have - they've put a kid in the middle.
The weird thing about this game is it's fairly universal and has also
been around for a really long time.
So this grid, you see it on roofing tiles dating from around 1300 BC
in ancient Egypt, you see the same grid chalked all over Rome
around the first century BC...
And you see it on stock cubes.
LAUGHTER AND APPLAUSE
So I'm going to make a connection between noughts and crosses,
and an ordinary box of matches,
and artificial intelligence.
How are we going to get there? Any thoughts?
Well, don't put the box of matches near Ross because he's already
set his house on fire once.
LAUGHTER AND GROANING
It was the otter.
So, in the 1960s, there was a former Bletchley Park code-breaker
called Donald Michie
and he decided what he really wanted to do was to build a computer
that would never lose at noughts and crosses.
What he did was he built it out of matchboxes and coloured beads,
and it was called MENACE -
the Matchbox Educable Noughts And Crosses Engine.
It consisted of 304 matchboxes because 304 is all the possible
situations that there are in noughts and crosses, OK?
And each box contains different-coloured beads.
Now, I have to tell you, we are going to show you such a machine.
It has been built by the mathematician Matthew Scroggs.
I do not fully understand it.
So, Matthew, I'm going to hand over to you.
I'll take this one. OK.
Matthew, I'm going to take it over to you. But this is a replica
that you've built yourself, isn't it?
This is the replica I've built of Donald Michie's original MENACE.
So it's built from 304 matchboxes, as you said.
The first important thing is we have a key here, which tells us
each of the nine squares I've given a colour to.
So the coloured beads inside the boxes tell me where MENACE
would like to play, using the colour code.
So we started the game earlier.
MENACE made three moves,
you made two moves. OK. Which means it's your move.
You're playing as crosses.
LOU: Who's Menace? ROSE: And is he single?
Right. So on the front of each matchbox,
we have pictures of all the positions in noughts and crosses.
So shortly I'm going to be looking through the pile to find the one,
but you first need to make a move, so I know which one to look for.
Sol don't want you to win.
Sol am going to put a cross.
Classic move, Sandi. Thank you, darling.
APPLAUSE
OK. Could you turn the board upside down?
There we go. There we go. The board now matches
the picture on the front of my matchbox.
OK. So this is the box we use. OK.
Inside this box, there will be three beads.
They will be coloured white, red and orange. Yeah.
Because those are the three places MENACE can move next.
Right? So those are the three empty spaces. Yes.
Up here on the, on the board.
So I'm now taking one of the beads out. Yeah.
And it is a red. Which is here?
Middle-right, which is there. So a nought goes there. This one?
Yeah.
Nought which means I am going to go here.
So I seem to have won. Does that spoil it? No.
So actually it's not surprising you've won because this MENACE
is quite a young MENACE. So it's not very intelligent so far.
But what we're going to do now is we're going to do the learning step,
which makes it a machine-learning machine.
So because MENACE lost,
if we take the last matchbox we used,
we picked a red bead.
Mm-hm. This was a bad move cos this let you win.
So I'm going to take this red bead away.
So now, next time MENACE uses this box, it doesn't have a red bead,
so it will try something else.
So it's not going to make the same mistake and lose again.
But this was the beginning, was it not, of understanding
that it was possible somehow to develop the concept
of machine learning?
Is this the same principle as
tick all the boxes that have got traffic lights in?
They work on a similar system.
The whole idea is that it's all about trial and error.
So you try lots of things and you keep the things that work.
So this looks like it's learning.
It's not actually thinking or learning,
but it behaves like it does.
ROSS: It's a long way from that to the Terminator, isn't it?
Thank God! We're only at the matchbox!
I tell you what, when they do the prequel to the Terminator,
that's going to be a boring film, isn't it?
A box of matches lands out the sky!
But you know what's amazing about it, and I get
that it's really complicated and I have not fully understood it,
but I love that a man by himself with a series of matchboxes
and some beads was the founding person to come up with the idea
that a machine could learn. It is amazing, isn't it?
It's incredible. So if you want to know more about it,
which I really hope what we've done is
we've sort of tickled your interest in it, WHAT can we do, Matthew?
So there's a blog post on my website and a playable version
of it, so you can play against it to kind of really see that it does
get better at noughts and crosses.
How many times does it need to play it for it to get intel,
like smart enough to...? After about 30 games,
it will draw half the time and lose half the time.
After about 60 or 70 games, it will pretty consistently draw.
Oh, my God.
How good is that against five Zippo lighters?
Matthew, thank you so much indeed.
APPLAUSE AND CHEERING
What is the curse of knowledge?
Oh, go on, ask me.
What is the curse of knowledge? Alan?
Well, ignorance is bliss, Sandi, isn't it, you see?
OK, I'm going to demonstrate what I mean by it.
OK. So let's start with you, Ross.
You've got a stick beside you.
Oh, have I? Oh, sorry.
And there is a card next to you,
which, I do not want you to say it out loud,
but there's the name of a well-known tune,
which I'm going to get you to tap out on the desk with your stick.
OK? OK. What do you think are the chances,
like percentage-wise, the chances of us guessing
what you're tapping out?
I would think 2%. 2%?
Why, are you really rubbish at tapping? No,
it's just because you've only got the rhythm, haven't you?
You haven't got the... Give it a go. Give it a go. I'm ready to be proved wrong. OK. OK.
If you get down to the woods today you're sure of a big surprise.
Yes! Oh, yeah. Wow!
WOW!
Wow! Can I just say...
He's a wizard! Burn him!
...also overlooked for Never Mind The Buzzcocks.
That was VERY impressive.
There was a famous experiment done by a psychologist called
Elizabeth Newton in the 1990s,
and so she got people to tap out tunes,
and the tappers used to estimate beforehand how much success
they were going to have. And so, they mostly guessed things like 50%.
In fact, their success rate was about 2.5%. I said 2, didn't I?
I said 2! Yeah, you did.
I said 2. But he's a wizard, so...
But what happened was the tappers were astonished that people
couldn't get it from the tapping
because they knew what the answer was,
so they rather imagined that the listeners must know
what the answer was. And it's known as the curse of knowledge.
We all overestimate our ability to clearly convey information,
and we find it very difficult to remember or know that somebody
doesn't actually know the answer.
And you see it in young children.
And the thing about young children is they haven't yet learned to try
and compensate for this effect.
So, show a four-year-old a box of sweets, or what looks like a box
of sweets on the outside, and you say, "What's inside this box?"
And they'll say, "Sweets."
If you open it and show them that there are pencils inside,
then immediately they go, "Oh, yeah, yeah, it's pencils," right?
So when the next child is asked, "What do you think is in this box?"
And the child says, "Sweets,"
the other child goes, "Idiot. Idiot." Yeah.
"You're an idiot, it's pencils. Everybody knows it's pencils."
Because they can no longer imagine
not knowing that it's got pencils in there.
Well, kids are thick, aren't they? So...
I've got one, you know, I've got one. What are the percentages of us
having a guess? 100%. 100%, OK. Get real.
National anthem.
Come on, everyone.
AUDIENCE: # Twinkle, twinkle, little star
# How I wonder what you are. #
I KNEW you were getting it!
So what I think is, ten points for the audience.
CHEERING
You know what this means.
Brand-new TV format -
Tap Gear.
LAUGHTER AND APPLAUSE
Come on!
Now, we've toed the line, ticking every box along the way,
let's tack in the direction of general ignorance.
What are those little bumps you can see on your tongue, called?
Herpes.
Papillae.
They ARE called papillae. Yes!
You're so clever today! APPLAUSE
And what do you do with those?
Well, cats scrape the skin off animals with them.
I've seen a lion eat horse meat, and its papillae are so sharp,
it can lick a lump of horse meat and it'll hang off its tongue. Wow!
So, though, for us, they're not really serving a lot of purpose.
Do you know what the purple bits are? Make 'em look pretty?
Those are our taste buds. Taste buds. Yeah.
Which most people think are the little bumps, but they are,
in fact, ALL taste buds are entirely invisible to the naked eye.
25% of the population, mainly women, are what are called super-tasters.
They're specifically good at detecting bitterness.
This is the sort of thing you should have on a Tinder profile.
And then there's 25% of people are non-tasters and these are people
who can't detect bitter tastes at all.
Equally good on a Tinder profile.
"I can't taste, I can't detect anything."
It is worth knowing because super-tasters tend to be
fussy eaters because they can taste so many more things.
Children are more sensitive to bitterness than adults,
so when a child says, "That Brussels sprout tastes disgusting,"
it probably to them is absolutely disgusting.
Also, Brussels sprouts ARE disgusting. No!
Whoa. I'll stop you there.
I love them! I'll stop you right there.
I'm a super-taster!
Anyway, moving on.
Where would you find the world's oldest boomerang?
Oh, it's still out there somewhere.
Where would you find it? Come on, what's the obvious...?
Australia.
KLAXON
Kent. Yeah, it's probably in a British museum
because they bloody stole it from Australia.
So the oldest surviving Australian boomerang comes from a peat bog
in South Australia. It's about the same age as boats.
It's about 10,000 years old.
But in 1986, archaeologists found a boomerang in southern Poland.
Uh! Mm! At 23,000 years old, either it was Polish
or it had come a bloody long way.
That is a fingernail, I'm so sorry to say.
It's the exact same shape as the Australian boomerang, but made
of a mammoth tusk.
And there are carved ancient boomerangs.
They're found all over the world, from North Africa to Arizona.
They were probably used in hunting and in warfare.
Almost all of the non-Australian ones are non-returning, as it were.
If you want a returning boomerang, you have to find an Australian one.
Have you tried a boomerang? I have.
Have you tried catching a wooden boomerang?
Is it painful? Take your fingers off.
Cos you go, "I've clone it! I've done it!"
Oh, shit!
I don't want it to come back.
I had one that my auntie in Australia sent me as a present
and I opened it up, went in the garden and threw it,
and it looped right round and
into next door's window
and set the burglar alarm off.
My ex-boyfriend used to call me Boomerang
because I kept coming back.
Oh, sweetie.
That, and other names. OK.
They tried it out on the International Space Station.
I don't know how there was room, but they wanted to prove
that a boomerang would work the same in zero gravity.
So in 1992, the astronauts had a go. I don't see why it wouldn't work.
They rely on air - there's air on the International Space Station.
They just seem to be up to random shit up there. They're like
"Ooh, what does chocolate milk look like in no gravity?"
You're like, "Do your job!"
They're up there with 300 matchboxes.
Ancl then the beans all float out! "Oh, no!
"No!"
Two things I did not know about boomerangs -
Boomerang World Championships,
the Germans and the Americans win nearly all the titles.
Australians have not won since 1984.
And Britain exports over 50,000
boomerangs a year.
But they keep coming back. No...
Now, who invented the talking cure?
Freud.
KLAXON
Not Freud. It's the person who doesn't get the credit
and ought to get the credit for it.
LOU SIGHS Oh, a woman...probably.
The Bitter Feminist - the new podcast.
Every week, "It was a woman, probably."
Anna O was a famous client of Freud's. Yeah, I know.
She was a woman called Bertha Pappenheim.
She had headaches and blurred vision and hallucinations, memory loss, all sorts of things.
And she went to a physician called Josef Breuer and asked for help,
and he decided she had hysteria
because she had uncontrolled emotions.
And she suggested that what she would like to do is to talk
through her symptoms in detail.
She called it the talking cure or chimney sweeping,
which I quite like.
And Dr Breuer and his young colleague, Sigmund Freud,
co-wrote a landmark work of psychology, called
Studies In Hysteria, in 1895.
And they wrote about her case under the pseudonym of Anna 0,
and used her term, "The talking cure".
But it was her idea. Is he in a high-heeled shoe?
Where are you...? LAUGHTER
Cos you know women - the two things they love is
yapping away and high heels.
I'll tell you what, with that stick, she can be the first
celebrity guest on Tap Gear!
"Our star with a reasonably priced stick, bring her on!
"Get in your shoe!"
Right, talking of talking, it's time to talk about the scores.
Finishing last, with a taxi for one, with -20,
it's Alan. APPLAUSE AND CHEERING
In fourth place, with two points,
it's Rose. APPLAUSE AND CHEERING
In third place, with three,
it's Lou. APPLAUSE AND CHEERING
In second place, with four points, it's Ross.
APPLAUSE AND CHEERING
Which means, in first place, and getting a big tick from me,
with ten points, it's the audience!
APPLAUSE AND CHEERING
Thank you to Rose, Ross, Lou and Alan.
And we leave you with this tactical solution to a tough problem
from Albert Einstein.
When I was young, I found out that the big toe always ends up
making a hole in a sock.
So I stopped wearing socks. Goodnight.
APPLAUSE AND CHEERING