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The Smartest Browser and OS

The IQ League maintain a "60 Second IQ Test" online. Interestingly, they correlate the results of this test with a number of statistics available from their server logs. Along with the geographical distinctions like city and country, the referrer and OS/Browser user-agent strings are also mined, to determine the Smartest Browser and OS. Cutting to the chase, the very smartest is Firefox on Unknown (which internal evidence suggests is MacOS-Intel), and the dumbest, as of this writing, is IE on WinNT. Quick! Test out and move the bars on the pretty graph! Can we make Slashdot.org the "Smartest Website in the World?" (It's currently number 2 behind ScienceBlogs.com.)

53 of 436 comments (clear)

  1. "Curretly"? by Kickersny.com · · Score: 5, Funny

    Can we make Slashdot.org the "Smartest Website in the World?" (It's curretly number 2 behind ScienceBlogs.com.) Are they serious?
    1. Re:"Curretly"? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Funny

      And why does the poster think that a larger amount of Slashdot users taking the test will help bring up the score? This does not compute.

    2. Re:"Curretly"? by The+Ancients · · Score: 5, Funny

      Can we make Slashdot.org the "Smartest Website in the World?" (It's curretly number 2 behind ScienceBlogs.com.) Are they serious?

      Dedly

    3. Re:"Curretly"? by palegray.net · · Score: 3, Funny

      You have to understand that traditional metrics of intelligence don't apply to troll populations; they rely on "cumulative intelligence" instead of individual or averaged values. The fact that the average troll's intelligence is in the single digits is offset by their sheer numbers; some have speculated that the rise of SkyNet may actually be precipitated by the combined intellectual contribution of 1.57 billion troll-moderated Slashdot posts.

    4. Re:"Curretly"? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Funny

      A few minutes ago, /. was #8. Now it's #11. Way to go /.ers, you've proven how intelligent you really are.
      Edit: In the amount of time it took me to write this and hit preview, /. dropped to #15.

    5. Re:"Curretly"? by JustinOpinion · · Score: 4, Insightful

      And as of now, Slashdot is ranked 15.

      To me, this says more about sample size (or lack thereof) in these stats. The sample sizes are probably so small that the ranks are just statistical artifacts of the scores of the few people coming from each site. Also I'm sure the average scores are highly skewed by people who start taking the test and then just get bored and randomly guess some answers to get it over with. For small samples, small aberrations (e.g. a few smart, stupid, or lazy users) can obviously greatly skew the average.

      Stats are nearly meaningless without some estimation of the error bars (or at least mention of the sample size!). All that to say: I wouldn't take these stats too seriously! Moreover, it's likely that as more and more Slashdotters take the test, the average will drop further and further from its statistically-anomalous level, to a more reasonable average. (As would the other listed categories, if only more people took the test.)

      (Note: that's all assuming the test itself is even a valid measure of IQ, which I find rather dubious.)

    6. Re:"Curretly"? by Awptimus+Prime · · Score: 5, Funny

      Oh it'll go down further once I am done randomly clicking answers, saying I am from /. then deleting my cookie and repeating a few more times.

    7. Re:"Curretly"? by egomaniac · · Score: 3, Insightful

      As for the validity of the IQ test, it had two nearly identical Bible questions (which book comes after Genesis). Is such simple factual knowledge even relevant to IQ?

      There's a slight correlation between basic knowledge like this and IQ, but it's hardly a useful type of question. Especially if the person you're testing isn't Christian.

      For example, it asked me the date on which we dropped the bomb on Hiroshima... I knew it was 1945, but don't know the particular date. I wasn't even born until thirty years later. I'm not sure that the fact that I didn't happen to know the exact date off the top of my head means I'm not as smart as somebody who did.

      --
      ZFS: because love is never having to say fsck
    8. Re:"Curretly"? by arotenbe · · Score: 4, Funny

      Wait a minute... are you saying there's actually another person on /. who looks at the previews submitting them?

      --
      Tomato wedge sperm darts that are Republican.
    9. Re:"Curretly"? by rve · · Score: 4, Funny

      The advertisement section on this slashdot page says more about the average /. user than an online test:

      - Ads by google
      - Linux gurus wanted
      - Beautiful Russian girls for marriage
      - Looking for a junior IT job?

  2. IQ Test? by homer_s · · Score: 5, Insightful

    Since when do IQ tests contain questions about the bible, dinosaurs, etc?

    Not that I'm disappointed that I did so badly or anything...

    1. Re:IQ Test? by Coopjust · · Score: 5, Informative

      Yeah, some of the questions I received were about the Beatles and Russian History. Those seem like historical knowledge tests, not intelligence quotient...

    2. Re:IQ Test? by gujo-odori · · Score: 5, Informative

      Mine had a questions about who is the creator according to Hinduism, and for what was Al Capone eventually imprisoned? While I happen to know the answers to those things, it has absolutely nothing to do with my IQ, nor would not knowing them. At this point, I'm only certain of one thing: my IQ is higher than that of anyone who thinks that's an IQ test.

    3. Re:IQ Test? by schon · · Score: 5, Funny

      I always get a giggle out of these "IQ" tests that require the use of javascript and cookies.

      I guess if you visit their site with noscript, your IQ is so high it can't be measured!

    4. Re:IQ Test? by mrbluze · · Score: 5, Insightful

      the most popular book in the world The most published, but I doubt even 1% of bibles have actually been read.
      --
      Do it yourself, because no one else will do it yourself. [beta blockade 10-17 Feb]
    5. Re:IQ Test? by Oktober+Sunset · · Score: 5, Insightful

      Sorry, but how does knowing what date the H-bomb was dropped on Hiroshima measure any kind of intelligence?

      That's general knowledge, and the ability to answer is dependent on culture, US or Japanese people would be be more likey to know the answer as it's a part of thier history. Linguistic inteligence is measured by things like the word logic ones (Retarded monkey, brain damaged baboon, the person who wrote that IQ test, Rocket scientist, which one is the odd one out?), all IQ tests should be answerable without any outside knowledge. What it is measuring is whether I can work out the calculation in my head, not if I was paying attention in history lessons 10 years ago.

    6. Re:IQ Test? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 3, Informative

      The atomic bomb dropped on Hiroshima (Little Boy) wasn't an H-bomb.

    7. Re:IQ Test? by Max+Littlemore · · Score: 3, Insightful

      Apparently people smarter than you are have decided that "who is the creator according to Hinduism, and for what was Al Capone eventually imprisoned" are very relevant to your IQ.

      Aaaah, that's one of those arguments stupid people make when trying to beat intelligent people in an argument.

      The same kind of stupid people who think that intelligence can be assessed world wide from general knowledge questions which are obviously based in narrow cultural bounds. Stupid stupid stupid.

      --
      I don't therefore I'm not.
    8. Re:IQ Test? by Eskarel · · Score: 3, Insightful
      While I agree with you that knowing something about other peoples religions is a useful thing to know, and while I might even agree with you that given that lapsed Christianity is the most prevalent religion in most western societies, knowing the exact contents of the bible, let alone the order of the books is really rather pointless.

      Technically speaking you could be one of those folks who believe that every word in the bible is true and memorize every word in the bible so that you know what you believe and you still wouldn't actually have to know the order of the books(though unless someone cut up your bible and gave it back to you in random order as an experiment you probably would). Since even a devout follower doesn't actually need to know what book comes after Genesis, I doubt that someone of another faith(or lack thereof) should need to know that kind of detail.

      If they really wanted to test cultural or historical knowledge of the bible they could have asked a whole lot more applicable questions.

    9. Re:IQ Test? by Simon+Brooke · · Score: 3, Insightful

      And to respond to your criticism that "the ability to answer is dependent on culture"... Well, that's the entire point. If you don't know culture, that reflects a deficiency in your social intelligence.

      Ok, so if the questions referenced the Bhagavad Gita, the Quran and the Prose Edda - all extremely important cultural artifacts - they would form part of a useful test of your intelligence, would they?

      Certainly if you don't know any culture, that reflects on your intelligence. But the fact that you don't know a specific culture does not. There are people in the world who've never read the Epic of Gilgamesh, the Rigsveda, or The Art of War. Those people aren't necessarily stupid.

      --
      I'm old enough to remember when discussions on Slashdot were well informed.
  3. Great. by One+Childish+N00b · · Score: 3, Informative

    Is there any way this is not going to turn into a flamewar and/or an excuse to bash IE?
    Come on, guys, we know it sucks. Let's have some news already.

    --
    Dealing with lawyers would be a lot less tedious if they all looked like Casey Novak.
    1. Re:Great. by FooAtWFU · · Score: 4, Funny

      I dunno. We could distract people for a bit by bashing another of their spectacularly stupid entries, though, Googlebot/2.1 on Unknown! Stupid Googlebot. :(

      --
      The World Wide Web is dying. Soon, we shall have only the Internet.
  4. The Beatles and IQ by allanw · · Score: 5, Insightful

    How does knowing facts about the Beatles (2/10 questions) have anything to do with IQ?

  5. Your IQ is 100.44 by Miffe · · Score: 5, Funny

    You are #5971 Smartest Human in the World

    Oh well, it's at least lower than my slashdot-id.

  6. Doesn't matter what you've scored... by Jorophose · · Score: 5, Funny
  7. No matter what you score.. by QuantumG · · Score: 4, Funny

    they'll tell you that you're not very intelligent and that they can fix you.

    Oh wait, that's Scientology.

    --
    How we know is more important than what we know.
  8. Dropping Score by blavallee · · Score: 5, Informative

    /. has dropped to number 11

    Guess no one took into account the large sector of (insert field) managers that read slashdot.

  9. "IQ" test? by ucblockhead · · Score: 5, Insightful

    Whoever wrote this "IQ" test is apparently not smart enough to understand how an IQ test works.

    You can debate whether a real IQ test measures anything other than the ability to do well on IQ tests, however, real IQ tests don't depend on real world knowledge. That's the whole point of them. By my measure, 8 of the 10 questions it gave me are not even remotely worthy of being on an IQ test. For instance, knowing the date of the first olympiad is pretty much the definition of a question requiring real world knowledge.

    --
    The cake is a pie
    1. Re:"IQ" test? by JustinOpinion · · Score: 5, Insightful

      Yeah it seems more like a test of how quickly you can Google for answers.

    2. Re:"IQ" test? by Bill+Wong · · Score: 3, Interesting

      even worse than you think. i wrote a short script and went through ~1500 questions and there were only 138 uniques.
      it's trivial for anyone to just create a database of answers for that few a number of questions.
      i'm already working on writing a bot to take the quiz automatically

  10. Blind leading the blind? by liegeofmelkor · · Score: 4, Funny

    I'm sorry, but anyone who can't manage to put x-y axes on their plots isn't fit to analyze the intelligence of others.

  11. Re:Still using safari or IE? by Darkness404 · · Score: 5, Interesting

    That is odd though, I have installed Firefox on many computers when I have done technical work, and most if not all still use IE as their primary browser usually filling it back up with spyware for me to remove again... About the only ways I know how to make people use Firefox is either A) switch Firefox to an IE icon, or B) delete all evidence of IE except for the .EXEs hidden in system folders. I highly, highly doubt that most Windows users using Safari are just the iTunes users, now, I would expect most of the downloads of Safari for Windows to have come from iTunes but downloads usually don't equal use of the browser.

    --
    Taxation is legalized theft, no more, no less.
  12. Pffffffffftttttt by Mattniche · · Score: 3, Funny

    What a load of rot. I didn't read any questions and just did some random clicking. 85.26% is WAY higher than my IQ.

  13. Random numbers smarter than median human? by geekgirlandrea · · Score: 5, Funny

    Apparently, Perl's PRNG is the 6883rd smartest human on earth with an IQ of 101.36. Why do people pay attention to tests like this again?

  14. Annoying bible book ordering questions by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 3, Insightful

    Er... nice for the non-Christians and non-Jews in the crowd:

    "Genesis is the first book of the Bible. Which of the following is the second book? (a) Genesis (b) Kings (c) Exodus (d) Numbers"

    Uh, surely a proper intelligence measuring question would be:

    "Which of the following books is not a work of fiction? (a) Genesis (b) Kings (c) Exodus (d) Origin of Species"

  15. Lower is better! by Joce640k · · Score: 4, Insightful

    I looked at the questions and I think dropping to to 11th place is a good sign.

    IQ test it ain't.

    --
    No sig today...
    1. Re:Lower is better! by physicsnick · · Score: 5, Insightful

      It's even worse than that. I got penalized for only answering ten questions. They suggested I answer twenty more to remove the penalty. IN 60 SECONDS!!!

      The test gives you about two seconds per question. That's not even enough time for general knowledge (read: culturally dependant) questions which don't belong on an IQ test, let alone complex pattern matching. I'm sorry, but that's no kind of IQ test.

    2. Re:Lower is better! by DeadChobi · · Score: 5, Insightful

      Apparently these guys don't know what an IQ test is. The first question I got was a "general knowledge" question, which doesn't require any type of intellectual inference. It's just a matter of whether or not you've absorbed the knowledge somehow.

      --
      SRSLY.
    3. Re:Lower is better! by RpiMatty · · Score: 3, Informative

      You don't have 60 seconds total.
      If you answer in less than 5 seconds, you get 1 point.
      If you answer in more than 45 seconds, you get 0.5 points.
      If you answer somewhere in between, you get somewhere in between 0.5 and 1 point.

      If your score is equal to the median, your IQ is 100.
      For each standard deviation away from the median, your IQ changes by 15 pts.

      From http://www.iqleague.com/iq-scores

    4. Re:Lower is better! by cp.tar · · Score: 4, Insightful

      Not only that, but the knowledge is both language-specific and, worse, America-specific.

      Let's assume that even the anagrams ("Which of these is not an anagram of an animal?" type of questions) don't pose a problem to non-native English speakers. But what about the question on the serial numbers of dollar bills? I haven't handled a dollar bill in my entire life; how would I know anything about serial numbers?

      Indeed, an IQ test it ain't.

      Oh, and another thing: I realized -- belatedly, though -- that it was 60 seconds per question. Now I must track down the damned cookie to re-take the test.
      Hm. 8 am. After class, then.

      --
      Ignore this signature. By order.
  16. Re:Still using safari or IE? by Gewalt · · Score: 3, Insightful

    I have a mac. Safari is a decent browser, but it fails epicly compared to FF as it does not have extensibility as a primary function. It's the plugins that make firefox awesome. IE and Safari just dont even compare. (Opera? not even in the same league as IE, let alone safari)

    --
    Modding Trolls +1 inciteful since 1999
  17. Unanswerable? by TheSkyIsPurple · · Score: 4, Interesting

    From the site:
    Five teenagers are of various heights. Alex is taller than Dennis, who is shorter than Eunice. Chris is shorter than Bob, but taller than Alex. Who among them is the third tallest? [1. Chris 2. Alex 3. Dennis 4. Eunice]

    To rewrite:
    Alex > Dennis
    Dennis < Eunice (but we don't know if Eunice is taller than Alex or not, etc)
    Chris < Bob
    Chris > Alex.

    Smushing these together (and getting all >'s in the same direction), you get:
    Bob > Chris > Alex > Dennis
    Eunice > Dennis

    These are the combinations I came up with that still fit the teenagers relative heights:
    Bob > Chris > Alex > Eunice > Dennis
    Bob > Chris > Eunice > Alex > Dennis
    Bob > Eunice > Chris > Alex > Dennis
    Eunice > Bob > Chris > Alex > Dennis

    Who is the third tallest?
    Well, Alex, Chris or Eunice. (Answers 1, 2, or 4.)

    What did I miss?

    [Even if I read "who is shorter than Eunice" to mean Alex < Eunice I still end up with 2 of the answers]

    1. Re:Unanswerable? by mwigmani · · Score: 3, Interesting

      This was the best one I got:*

      Question 8 of 10
      Which is the odd one out: lead, brass, tin, copper?

      1). lead
      2). aluminum
      3). brass
      4). copper

      * copied verbatim

  18. Re:Still using safari or IE? by nbarriga · · Score: 3, Interesting

    So extensibility is your main/only reason for choosing a browser? What about speed, ease of use, % of pages rendered OK, safety? (Yes, I use Opera)

  19. Re:Still using safari or IE? by MadnessASAP · · Score: 5, Funny

    Me too! I guess that makes us the entire opera market share.

    --
    I may agree with what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to face the consequences of saying it.
  20. Re:Still using safari or IE? by flink · · Score: 3, Informative

    CMD+Option + on the mac gives that to you on the system level and virtual resolutions does the same under X windows. I guess it's useful under MS Windows though. I've found that Firefox will usually respond to Ctrl++ if you hit it enough times though, so I've never really found myself missing zoom on WinNT.

  21. Re:Still using safari or IE? by Herby+Sagues · · Score: 4, Interesting

    Actually, the timer function is apparently not working in IE with Vista (which counts as IE over NT). I get the same results if I wait a minute as if I get the answers immediately (which are pretty easy, though just in case I checked my answers were right with reliable sources). That would explain low Windows NT scores. I would actually be surprised if there was actually any significant correlation between browser use and IQ, given that most computer users use whatever someone else installed on their computers (IT, OEM or some friend). And if you think otherwise, you are probably confusing intelligent with computer savvy.

  22. My Bad by Max+Littlemore · · Score: 5, Insightful

    I got stuck on the first question.

    It said "Who is Winnie the Pooh's depressive donkey friend?" and I spent too long looking for the "How the fuck does knowing something about British children's fiction later bastardised by Disney tell you anything about my intelligence?" option.

    Sorry everyone, I should have known better than to try and answer a question with a question.

    --
    I don't therefore I'm not.
  23. The Test is Stupid by jbrader · · Score: 3, Funny

    It said I live in Herndon, VA. I live in Pullman, WA. It's pretty far fom here. It also said I'm something like the 3300th smartest person in the world. Since I'm really drunk right now that's pretty sad.

    --
    You are so boring that when I see you my feet go to sleep.
  24. Re:Still using safari or IE? by dafrazzman · · Score: 5, Interesting

    I would actually be surprised if there was actually any significant correlation between browser use and IQ, given that most computer users use whatever someone else installed on their computers (IT, OEM or some friend). And if you think otherwise, you are probably confusing intelligent with computer savvy. I wouldn't be so doubtful. I'm sure there's a link between critical thinking and tendency to use Firefox over IE.

    Assume you have a group of people of relatively moderate computer savviness. They all use IE, and you tell them all about Firefox. Some of them will say "Pssh... whatever" and conclude that IE is both adequate and familiar, making it easy to rationalize not considering a change. Others will note the benefits along with your shining recommendation and consider a switch.

    If we conclude from this that the ones who blew it off think less critically (a debatable, but reasonable assumption), we will indeed see more critical thinking people using IE.

    It isn't much of a leap then to say that Firefox users are in some way "smarter" than IE users.

    If you can't say that, you can at least say that they're more likely to give a hoot about the test and try harder than the others.

    --
    My preferred name is frazz, but someone keeps taking it. If you see him, tell him I said hi.
  25. Re:Still using safari or IE? by The+Master+Control+P · · Score: 3, Insightful

    You should charge. Otherwise there's no consequence for being stupid and no incentive to not be stupid.

  26. for foreign people it is a language test by someone1234 · · Score: 4, Insightful

    Real IQ tests should be language independent.

    --
    Patents Drive Free Software as Hurricanes Drive Construction Industry
  27. Re:Still using safari or IE? by God'sDuck · · Score: 3, Interesting

    If they have an IE-only site (like Netflix Watch-Now) I set the homepage on IE to Netflix, and the homepage on Firefox to whatever their homepage was. I tell them "The orange fox is the internet, the blue E is Netflix." Works fine.