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The Memory Masters

Vaystrem writes "Wired's Article 'The Masters of Memory' details the outcome of the recent U.S. Memory Championship ,where 'three dozen people who had, in just five minutes, memorized the positions of 52 cards in a shuffled deck and were now happily organizing cards in a new deck into the same order as the pack they had memorized.'" The article includes details of "the mind numbing upcoming world championship. Could you in a half hour 'memorize a random string of thousands of 1s and 0s'?" I'm still working on the mnemonic alphabet.

6 of 282 comments (clear)

  1. Mnemesis by SharpFang · · Score: 4, Informative

    Open source program for training mnemotechnic memory:
    Mnemesis

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    45 5F E1 04 22 CA 29 C4 93 3F 95 05 2B 79 2A B2
  2. Re:How often... by SharpFang · · Score: 4, Informative

    > do you actually need to memorize random strings of numbers

    PIN codes, phone numbers, ID numbers, passwords, registration numbers.
    They are hardly ever as long as 150 digits but they are EXTREMELY common.

    > Instead, our brains are much better suited to recognizing patterns

    RTFA, that's what the whole concept is based on. Just associate symbols with patterns/images and then create a story/image based on the set created.

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    45 5F E1 04 22 CA 29 C4 93 3F 95 05 2B 79 2A B2
  3. just find a clever encoding scheme by 1iar_parad0x · · Score: 3, Informative

    "Anyone who considers arithmetical methods of producing random numbers is, of course, in a state of sin."
    -John Von Neumann

    Any decimal number has approximately 3/10 the number of characters of it's binary equivalent. There is no exponential change in the shear number of characters to process.
    [e.g. 2^10=1024, 2^20=1M etc]

    Thus If I encode my data from binary to HEX, I get better "compression" of information.

    Note: IIRC, according to Algorithmic Information Theory, if I were trying to encode "all the data of the universe", then the fact that my compression scheme only reduces the amount of information by a constant and the computation for conversion would probably be so incredibly expensive, there exists no computational gain from Mnemonics.

    However, if I'm given a piece of paper and allowed to use a clever encoding scheme than might be able to "memorize" anything. I only need to memorize a smaller number and the program, which encodes it. Thus deriving my result. Remember, by the rules of this competition I have more time than memory here. Frankly, I think an encoding competition would be more interesting.

    I'm curious as to how this philosophy relates to AIT, Wolfram's Principle of Computational Equivalence, and foundational mathematics.

    "There are two kinds of science -- physics and stamp collecting"
    -Ernest Rutherford
    (Or has he quoted similarly, if I wanted to memorize science, I would have studied botany)

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    What do you mean my sig is repetitive? What do you mean my sig is repetitive? What do you mean....
  4. Re: exploit the underlying nature of your brain! by NoData · · Score: 2, Informative


    The story you are referring to is the true account of one the most famous subjects in psychology--"S" studied by the Russian neurologist AR Luria. He authored a book called "The Mind of A Mnemonist: A Litte Book About a Vast Memory." The man could not forget anything and was tortured his whole life by it. Highly recommended reading.

  5. Re:Sponsored by... by geekoid · · Score: 4, Informative

    As someone who has done Casino Security(long,long ago) I can say most casinos don't want card counter.

    1 card counter is a draw, 100 card counters is a loss. which is what you get when it becomes known you don;t mind counters. Counter often work in teams.

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    The Kruger Dunning explains most post on /. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dunning%E2%80%93Kruger_effect
  6. Re:The number is 7+/-2 by jtdubs · · Score: 2, Informative

    Sorry dude, but 1024 bits is 256 hex digits. Each hex digit represents one nibble, or one half-byte which is 4-bits. And, 1024 >> 2 is clearly 256.

    Now, I notice you are listing them in groups of 4, which makes 64 groups of four. But, those groups aren't hexadecimal characters, they are hexadecimal words of 2-bytes in length.

    Justin Dubs