In the period where everything that was worth knowing could be found in the bible, proving oneself smart meant studying it and the publicly answering questions by other smarty pants about it.
Now it’s common to believe (and tweet) that because you can read or write stuff in a book, no longer presents as a feat of awesomeness. Writing stuff in books was the thing that replaces the public disputation. Now, books have been replaced with blocks.
A step forward in working out who is smart is to build a virtual world of your peers and revert to the disputation method.
This means a kid hammering the minecraft forums is perfectly viable candidate for being in the top ten percent of smart people at the age of ten, as no exam is capable of measuring this new (yet 500 year old) method of selecting societies clever-clever clogs.
Perhaps assessment via text should just be written off as an epoch, where the world’s best scholars just needed Notch to arrive.
Doctor of Redstone, step forward.
N.b. this post is humorously offered while waiting for code to cook.
Playable 