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.

Comments

Re:Hmm

[Smitedogg]

Silly mods, the joke is his user name...think it through......YES, that's it!!

Correlation between memory and intelligence?

[Fiz Ocelot]

The article gives the impression that memory = intelligence. But I would beg to differ. So what if you can memorize a long binary string. You may not even know it is binary, nor what the string translates to.

I guess the thinking is, "well they do very well on tests". Sure, that's because they memorized everything. But do they Understand? There's a difference between knowing something, and really understanding what it means. I really think schools should focus more in testing how well a student really understands a subject, perhaps demonstrate the ability to teach it to someone else.

Re:Correlation between memory and intelligence?

[Gyan]

You bring up the usual objection.

However, you're limiting memory to declarative memory (where's my keys?, who's that girl?, what movie was that dialogue from?). But your skills are themselves (implicit) memories. You learn when young, something like language. You can construct proper grammatical and meaningful sentences later in life, only because your brain remembers what it learnt earlier.

Re:Correlation between memory and intelligence?

[shawnce]

However just remembering something that you learned in the past isn't in itself a good indication of intelligence.

The ability to synthesize new knowledge based on the experiences and knowledge you have learned is a much better measure.

Re:Sponsored by...

[mindstrm]

That won't help you win, not by much.

Every good poker player already does that.. knows which cards he has seen that game, at least, any that matter (remember not all cards visible are always important).

The game of poker is ultimately a game of bluffing and one man -vs- the next.. a computer would not necessarily beat human players at poker.

Remember, the object is not to win each hand, but to win the other player's money.. and that COULD mean only winning one hand out of an entire sitting.

Re:NO, YOU ARE NOT SPECIAL

[shadowbearer]

This is a typical anonymous slashdot troll. The poster is trying to put down someone else's post where that person discovers that his abilities are not unique, as he'd long suspected, but rather are a deep and complex portion of the human experience. I know that the AC was expecting some kind of epiphany to result from this, but basically, he's just putting someone else down because he had no intelligent comment whatsoever to make and nothing to add to the discussion.

Sorry. Mod me flamebait for responding to an Anonymous Coward.

SB