Mike, perhaps "prodigy" was not the best word to use. In chess, I am thinking of somebody who maintains a consistent 1800-1900 USCF rating, playing a dozen or so tournaments a year. Somebody like that. Not a prodigy, but definitely somebody who is more than just passable. There is no equivalent rating system in music, so I'll drop that example.
There are a lot of learning theory implications here.
I think your experiment would not work with chess, I really don't. Because there is a binary outcome to chess, it would be a better experiment. Playing music to a teacher's satisfaction is still somewhat subjective, don't you think? If you lock a bunch of 1200 rated players, and told them that in order for them to get their next meal they must practice and beat a 1900 rated player, well, you would end up with a lot of dead 1200 rated players.
Besides, I've seen your youtube videos, and I am really not able to accept that what you can do is anything but extremely unusual.
You might be right about chess. I worked on chess pretty much when I was in high school, but never really got any good. (At my best, I was probably about 1600, pretty rotten. Recently, when I play against computers they tend to rank me around 1400 - even worse.) My big problem there, though, was probably that I almost never had any good opponents to learn from. The difficulty here is that it is hard to construct a training program based on proper rewards. How would you train chess? You can't just have a 1200 player go directly after a 1900 player - that's too much improvement to even know where to begin. There have been some good training program ideas out there for chess, but none that have really been nicely proven. Probably some of the Russian schools have some, but I don't know that much about them. (One of my favorites that I really wanted to try, but never quite got motivated enough to do, was this one:
http://www.chesscafe.com/text/skittles148.pdf. It would be interesting to see if it really worked - perhaps you could try my experiment with chess with this?) On the other hand, some training programs for piano have been shown to be quite successful; what I'm saying is that this whole idea requires a good training program to be successful.
Playing music to a teacher's satisfaction is subjective, but if you had what would be considered a traditional "good teacher" (say, one who had taught more than one prodigy before at some point or another), I believe if that teacher just used their normal judgments for teaching, they could coax great things out of most any student with "proper motivation" like this. I'm a part-time piano teacher myself, and it seems like most anyone can learn surprisingly much given the proper motivation.
As for my YouTube videos, the big difference between me and other big cube BLD solvers (other than how slow I am at 3x3x3 speedcubing, which is admittedly a big difference
) is the fact that I have done at least 3 4x4x4 BLD attempts and at least 3 5x5x5 BLD attempts every single week without fail for over a year (and often times I have done many more than that). And now I've been doing at least one 6x6x6 BLD and one 7x7x7 BLD attempt each week since they were available. That gives me MUCH more experience than almost anyone else in the world at it. (I know of only Chris Hardwick and István Kocza who might have done more, and I guess I'm not sure how much Rafal Guzewicz or Rowe Hessler have practiced.) So I suspect the difference here between me and others is simply motivation. For some weird reason, I feel compelled to practice big cubes BLD lots. If others did, they might be much better than me. People like Ville Seppänen and Alex Cook have gotten better than me at big cubes BLD with far less practice than me.
I think that back when I started, instructions for learning how to do big cubes BLD were scattered and somewhat hard to understand, so there was a barrier to learning how to do it. If someone were to take time to develop a training program for solving big cubes BLD, I suspect we'd see lots of people doing it.
(If in thinking of my videos, you were thinking of the juggling one, again this is just possible because I've practiced juggling for 30 years, so I'm passable at it. Most people in the cubing community aren't jugglers, so I have an advantage in that the "event" is tailor-made for me to succeed at. If you had an event requiring playing bass with one hand while solving a cube with the other, Dan Cohen and Rama Temmink would naturally seem impossibly good at it, since they already worked on both skills individually for so long. And with just a little practice, I'm sure Macky (who is also a skilled juggler) could outdo my juggling and solving behind the back video.)
Whew - sorry to write so much.
