My autistic five year old does things that you wouldn't think possible for a five year old. I've watched over his shoulder as he gets to 8192 in a game of 2048

My autistic five year old does things that you wouldn't think possible for a five year old. I've watched over his shoulder as he gets to 8192 in a game of 2048 (original rules, no "undo".) He understands exponents and logarithms. He can tell you that 9007199254740992 is 2^53, and that the base 2 logarithm of 4000000000 is between 31 and 32. If all you knew about him was that he's 5 years old, autistic, and still hasn't figured out the toilet, you might be skeptical of the above paragraph. You'd be prone to evaluate my son based on something other than his actual capabilities. One thing I've observed with him is that he tends to go from zero to awesome almost overnight. We had the hardest time getting him to speak, and then at around age 2 and a half he ballooned from a 10 word vocabulary to 250+ words in just over a month, and then quickly to complete sentences that were atypically advanced for his age. This sort of thing is normal for at least some subset of the autistic. Could this have come from an "autistic twelve year old who'd only been communicating for three years"? Absolutely -- if he began communicating, and then obsessed about it the way my son obsesses about numbers. Sure, there's reason to be skeptical regarding the methodology described in one of the comments, but "this could not possibly be a child communicating" is going too far in the skeptical direction.