USA National Memory Championships

bigtallmofo writes "Could you memorize 1,000 digits in under an hour? How about remember the exact order of 10 shuffled decks of playing cards in under an hour as well as one shuffled deck in less than two minutes? If so, you could be counted among 36 grand masters of memory worldwide. Slate is reporting that other spectacular memory feats were performed at the 2005 USA National Memory Championship. Congratulations to Ram Kolli, a graduate student in computer science at Virginia Tech, and this year's champ."

Comments

Re:Congress To Open Hearings On Memory Championshi

[zippthorne]

That's incorrect. A quick web search reveals: http://ask.yahoo.com/ask/20020826.html Only 555-0100 through 555-0199 are exclusively reserved for movies. The remainder of the 555 exchange is being parceled out.

AFAIK, this was not always the case though.

Re:1000 digits in an hour not particularly impress

[hugesmile]

no no no

0=s or z,
1=t or d
2=n
3=m
4=r
5=l
6=j, sh, ch
7=hard c, k
8=f, ph
9=p or b

Called the Major System, it's been around for hundreds of years (as I recall, haha).

In college I could memorize a deck of cards on clock-ticks. 52 seconds for a deck.

A more impressive trick (to most people) is to have the person shuffle the deck, take out 5 cards and put them in their pocket.

I flip through the remaining 47 card for 30 seconds, and tell them what's in their pocket. (Loraine / Lucas explain how to do this one in the memory book). It's not hard, but takes practice.

After that, I found girls, and quit doing the geek memory thing. You don't want girls to know that you have a good memory - then you lose all your excuses for forgetting to call them, forgetting anniversaries, etc.