When "brain power" is no longer the only criterion for contestants, will "The Strongest Brain" still be the same?
At the beginning of 2022, the ninth season of "The Strongest Brain" officially returned early! This show that once made the public breathtaking, after 8 seasons, has already fallen to the altar for various reasons!
Sticking to season 9, the number of contestants even shrunk to 42!
Originally thought that this would be a blockbuster upgrade of the show, after watching the list, XiaoBei could not help but sigh: "The Strongest Brain" has finally changed its flavor...
The list of participants was exposed, and the concentration of returnees from all walks of life exploded
As soon as the list of contestants in this season was announced, it immediately rushed to the hot search, and the returning combination of Cai Yangyang and Zhu Keqi in the eighth season became a major attraction of this season's "The Strongest Brain".
Cai Yangyang is not only the author of the fifth season of the brain, but also the first player in the previous preliminary examination; Zhu Keqi also ranked first in the ladder list when he had to retire due to academics.
In the eyes of everyone, these two returning players are still strong contenders for this year's brain king laurels!
In addition, this year, there are three popular Internet celebrity players who have also aroused heated discussion on the whole network!
One is Liu Wen, who graduated from University College London and works for one of the world's top ten design companies, and has joined a popular love show before participating in "The Strongest Brain", and has accumulated a lot of attention;
One is Chen Xian, the number one funny blogger at Zhejiang University; the other is Adam Chen Laosi, who has more than five million fans on the Internet.
As soon as the official poster came out, the heat of the discussion continued to rise, and even appeared on the relevant hot search, and the three of them also became the first contestants to gather the heat before the show started.
In addition to them, this season has also attracted many international student players, from Harvard University, Columbia University, UC Berkeley, university of Southern California, Imperial Technology, Sheffield, Michigan Ann Arbor, University of Melbourne, University of Waterloo, University of Toronto and other well-known institutions!
Columbia University
Li Yunxin Cao Yidong
Tu Bin Dai Yingliang
Columbia University, officially known as Columbia University in the City of New York, is located in Manhattan, New York, United States, and is one of the world's top private research universities, one of the fourteen founding institutions of the American Association of Universities, and one of the Ivy League schools.
Columbia university is one of the five oldest universities in the United States and one of the largest number of Nobel laureates, with 96 Nobel Laureates produced by October 2020. Columbia University also features 5 U.S. Founding Fathers, Barack Hussein Obama, Roosevelt and four other U.S. presidents, 34 heads of state and government, and 10 U.S. Supreme Court justices.
Columbia's acceptance rate is only about 6%, and Columbia's academic pressure is also very large, a current student once said: "Columbia University does not open its doors for the cowardly, difficult academics are the beginning of growth." There are excellent faculty, motivated students and extraordinary opportunities." The students who can successfully graduate are all talents who have experienced thousands of years of hard work.
The students who can successfully graduate are all talents who have experienced thousands of hammers, such as Cao Yidong, who received offers from 7 of the world's top universities during his studies at Columbia University.
Harvard University
Jiao Yiwen Zeng Huaming
Harvard University is tied for second place with Columbia University in the 2022 U.S. News Comprehensive University, the first university in North America, the sixth higher education institution in the English-speaking world, and one of the eight Ivy League universities in the United States, and is hailed as a model of higher education in the world.
The college of education attended by Tsang Huaming ranked second in the United States. Harvard University's teaching philosophy focuses on practicality, and in 2019, the only Chinese mainland student to admit it, Jiao Wanwen, won the Red Dot Design Concept Award and the German If Design Award, known as the "Oscar of the Design World".
Harvard's acceptance rate is 5 percent, and half of the admitted applicants have SAT scores between 1460 and 1580, or ACT scores between 33 and 35.
University of California, Berkeley
Han Dong Minghui
The University of California, Berkeley is one of the world's top public research universities, renowned in academia, and one of the world's top public universities.
Business, Engineering, Education, Law... As long as you can think of a major, Berkeley will not be outside the top 10 even if it does not rank in the top 5! The alma mater of this UC system has about 25,000 undergraduate students, and the huge student base makes the number of students in some basic courses reach hundreds of people at the same time. Many students admit to feeling academic pressure at Berkeley, especially for freshmen.
UC Berkeley admission is more difficult, but not as "mad" as Harvard and Columbia, the school's acceptance rate is 18%, Berkeley's admissions process is more focused on the overall level of applicants, the admissions department believes that a person's achievements can be reflected in any way, so the level of standard test scores alone will not determine whether you can be admitted to Berkeley.
University of Michigan, Ann Arbor
Hu Yutao
Founded in 1817 and located in Michigan, the University of Michigan is one of the top ten comprehensive public universities in the United States, known as the Public Ivy League, and one of the world's leading research universities. Ranked 23rd in the 2022 U.S. News Comprehensive University, one of the characteristics of the school is that it is very complete in subjects.
This season's Hu Yutao pursued a master's degree in architecture at the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor, and is tied for 7th place in the national professional ranking with MIT.
The University of Michigan at Ann Arbor has an acceptance rate of 26 percent, and the school has higher hardware requirements for applicants, with an average SAT score between 1340 and 1560, or an AVERAGE OF 31 to 34.
It has the fourth largest stadium in the world and the largest stadium in the United States, Michigan Stadium. It is also known as the "North American Sports School".
University of Southern California, USA
Wu Qingzhou
USC has 10 Nobel Laureates, 6 MacArthur Genius Award winners, and 1 Turing Prize winner. Alumni have won the first number of Oscars in the United States, including Spielberg, George Lucas and other film giants.
Films such as "Forrest Gump", "The Graduate", "Love at Harvard", and "The Ultimate Detective" have all been filmed in USC, and the school's film school and media school rank first in the world, which is the oldest film school in the United States.
This season's contestant Wu Qingzhou is in the top 3 in the United States majoring in entertainment law, where he has the opportunity to meet the best film industry workers in the country and the world.
In addition to film and media-related majors, the teaching strength of game design majors in USC's ace disciplines is also very prominent, ranking first in the 2022 US professional rankings.
University of London
Liu asked
The University of London, located in the capital of the United Kingdom, is a university administrative system composed of more than a dozen universities and research institutions in London, and is the world's most influential federal university body, also known as the "public federal university".
As of October 2019, the University of London has 18 member institutions, 2 million alumni, including 12 monarchs or royalty, 52 presidents or prime ministers, 84 Nobel laureates, 3 Olympic gold medalists and the "father of nations" of several countries. Princess Anne, the only daughter of Queen Elizabeth II, is currently the Superintendent of the University of London and its institutions.
Liu Qing, who works for one of the world's top ten design companies, joined a popular love show before participating in "The Strongest Brain" and accumulated a lot of attention.
University of Melbourne
Choi Kim-young
The University of Melbourne, founded in 1853, is one of the world's leading research universities located in Melbourne, Australia's cultural, arts and industry centre. Certified member of AACSB and EQUIS.
The University of Melbourne emphasizes the comprehensive ability of students in academic attainment and personality cultivation, and has produced 280,000 outstanding graduates from all over the world. These include 4 Australian prime ministers, 8 Nobel laureates and 120 Rhodes scholars. The University of Melbourne is one of the best universities in Australia.
Of course, the domestic college players are also eye-catching, and they are all graduated from 985/211.
The collection of top colleges and universities is, at first glance, a degree that ordinary people worship. But in "The Strongest Brain", the audience did not buy it.
It is reasonable to say that 42 people are carefully selected, and the players must have something outstanding to meet the definition of "the strongest brain".
But in the resume of the official poster, we see a confusing label:
· The whole network has more than 5 million fans;
· Caring ambassadors, image ambassadors;
· Upward Youth Title;
· Pioneer volunteers.
Admittedly, these contestants are excellent, but in the once-bizarre show, these experiences seem to have nothing to do with the "strongest brain".
As an audience, we can't even think of what kind of advantages these resume labels will bring to the players.
In the era when traffic is king, the competitive programs dominated by "high IQ wizards" finally had to follow the market and evolved into variety shows where traffic stars pressed and Internet celebrities gathered.
The strongest brain is no longer the "strongest"
Recalling the former program group, in order to find the population with the characteristics of the "strongest brain", it took nearly half a year to conduct a carpet search, and these strange people are largely a special group with high intelligence.
Wang Yuheng, who won the title of "Water Brother" with his super ability to distinguish water, lost 2/3 of his eyesight, and for his special skills, his explanation was: "I recognize water by imagination, just like the paintings I usually paint, to be honest, I can't figure it out myself, and I am still studying whether my method of identification is similar to the technique of painting." ”
"Chinese Rain Man" Zhou Wei, from an early age, was diagnosed with stubborn hypoglycemia and low intellectual development, but has an amazing talent for speed calculation. It took only about 1 minute to calculate the 14th power of the 16-digit number, and finally advanced with a perfect score of 150 points.
An hour to memorize 1984 numbers, breaking the world record in one fell swoop, Wang Feng, who was known as the "King of World Memory" at home and abroad, memorized two mahjong and 272 playing cards in just 8 seconds in the program.
In the second season of "The Strongest Brain", the only contestant with a full score, Bao Qi, blindly completed the challenge of the honeycomb maze, burning everyone's brain, and making all the challengers from all over the world look at the maze and sigh.
Brother Shui, Feng Wang, Bao Xu, Zheng Caiqian, Li Wei, Zhou Wei... These contestants have also become god-like beings in the eyes of the audience!
However, as the difficulty of finding "Strange People" has risen, the pressure of program innovation has doubled, and "The Strongest Brain" has faced more and more problems.
In the next few seasons, the program even declined rapidly due to the continuous turmoil of guests, the withdrawal of contestants, the questioning of shady screens and other negative news.
After falling off the altar and everything returning to zero, the contestants of "The Strongest Brain" have also changed.
They are no longer jaw-dropping "god-level figures", but just elite students who are better than ordinary people.
They do not necessarily have a scientific background resume, but they have mastered the traffic password of "appearance + education + background".
However, from another point of view, although "The Strongest Brain" can no longer let us see the "strongest" side, it is also in another way, conveying the excellent appearance that ordinary people can also become.
The original intention of "making science popular" hopes to return in the ninth season of the show. Retaining the essential characteristics may be able to satisfy the market and the audience, and everyone is happy.