English Audio Request

'A lot of our members are outcasts,' Haselbauer told me. 'They were geeks at school, never had many friends, they weren't really good with women. Then they come on to the site and they open right up. All of a sudden they love this. They think, "No one's going to come in here and make fun of me."'
The IHIQS also has an online novel in progress, and debating contests in which each participant is assigned a topic such as nuclear power and then has to argue both for and against. But Haselbauer has much higher hopes for his society than such highbrow but meaningless pastimes.
'This is where it gets really wild,' he told me. 'We can harness all this intelligence to solve real problems.' In effect, he has created an unpaid international online think-tank, and he is figuring out how best to employ it. Some members have compiled a dossier extolling the virtues of free trade for developing countries, but there are also practical possibilities. 'I have a member who's in the US navy, and he pointed out that the navy spends hundreds of millions of dollars repainting their ships because the salt in the water strips the paint. But the salt charge is just a simple negative ion, and electricity emits positive ions, so maybe if we put a little electric charge through the ship it wouldn't rust. But this guy is not a scientist, so then we enlist the support of a PhD in material sciences who is also a member, and he puts together a team to solve the problem. It could make a lasting impact on the world.'
The day after he told me this, I visited Haselbauer in his midtown apartment and we sat by his computer as he monitored the forums. He spoke about recruiting more women members, and about a couple in Australia who met online during a trivia night and are getting married soon. He then showed me a few puzzles he had lined up for the next World's Smartest Person competition, due to launch in a few weeks.
'This is a sequential matrix,' he said, handing me a sheet of paper that looked like a tablecloth from a psychedelic nightclub. It wasn't even clear what the question was. 'Things are moving around,' he explained with glee. 'The Xs turn into triangles, and triangles turn into circles and the colours change over. Only about one in 400,000 people will get it. It's almost unsolvable!'