Slashdot Mirror

Perhaps and perhaps not.

The current living "record holder" is 114. The Oldest Human Beings

These guys.

That must be it. Here's a picture of him.

The game does not "freeze."

You enter the "split screen" level, where part of the level is cut off, so that eating all the dots and continuing is impossible.

http://www.recordholders.org/en/news/news065.html

From this article:

The Rules
...
4. The timing begins when the number becomes visible to the competitor and ends at the end of writing the answer.
...

Many of you have compared the ability to memorise 22 digits in 4 seconds with the time of calculating the root. Well, the point is that you do not have to read the entire number to calculate the root if you just know that it is a perfect 13th power. You can get the first digits of the result by inspecting the first digits of the power (and memorising logarithms or doing some other good estimation). And the last digits of the result can be found by inspecting just the last digits of the power.
Two more remarks:
* If someone is interested in competitive mental calculation, the mailing list at http://groups.yahoo.com/group/MentalCalculation/ is the right place for you. Last month, there was the first Mental Calculation World Cup (http://www.recordholders.org/en/events/worldcup04 / whith 17 calculators from 10 countries
* World records for mental calculation are published in "The Book of Alternative Records" (http://www.alternativerecords.co.uk/). However, because some tasks are "easier" than others, we decided to publish a record for calculating 9 tasks in a row (one power ending in 1, ..., one power ending in 9) instead of records for single tasks. (Anyway, Gert did a great job with his single task result!)

There was a previous post referring to this site describing the rules. He would have therefore known about the problem beforehand. It's also interesting to know that he attempted it before with a 39.0-second time, beaten only by Alex Lemaire's 13.55 seconds.

According to this, he can also calculate the 23rd root of a 200 digit number in 41 seconds. There's also a picture of him there.

Here is a list of two other records he holds. It hasn't been updated for the one mentioned in the myway article.

Notice it took him 44.7 seconds to calculate the square root of a six digit number, but only 11.8 seconds to calculate the 13th root of a 100 digit number!!!!

He also calculated the 23rd root of a 200 digit number in 40.83 seconds.

I don't remember if this was the same guy I saw on TV. But the guy I saw was performing large multiplications and finding large roots in front of an elementary school class. They later showed doctors or scientists doing brain imaging on him while he solved math problems. What they found was that he was using parts of his brain that most people utilize during visualization (not sure how they were able to separate it from him actually seeing something). He said he visualizes the number in his head and then he can perform various manipulations on them and he can "see" the math work itself out. Obviously some is probably genetic, but he also commented on practicing his methods for 5-7 years. He also appears to not be the only root master.

A photo of Gert Mittring can be found here.

Please note his rather tasteful attire.

The page also has information on the actual rules on calculating the 13th root of a 100 digit number.

It's for a 100-digit number whose13th root is an integer. Read the rules about how it works here

It's not a new world record, it's simply a new championship winner. The world record is still 16.53 seconds.

Didi Senft, known as The Devil who cajoles riders in the Grand Tours of european cycling builds some very unusual bicycles, including world record holding largest bicycle