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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."
By The Washington Post and The Associated Press
WASHINGTON -- Senator John McCain (R-AZ) announced Friday afternoon that the Senate would be opening hearings on the USA National Memory Championships after allegations of illegal memory augmentation surfaced. "These allegations of illegal computer implants are very frightening, and we owe it to the American people to investigate this matter fully. Our children are looking up to these men and women as role models, and if they're not actually memorizing things on their own with their God given abilities, we need to put an end to it. There are long term dangers to brain function many of these people are either unaware of or simply ignoring for short-sighted goals."
This year's champion Ram Kolli was among the first to be subpoenaed in the matter, and was expected to testify this week. "I've never illegaly used a computer to assist my memory in my life" said Kolli, noting that he had used computer storage in the past but only in legal ways, such as for class notes and assignments. "I've trained too long and too hard for these championships to throw it all away by using illegal implants. When I memorized pages 73 through 82 of the New York City phonebook, that was all me, and Jorge Benwalt of 212-555-2934 knows it."
Several Google executives have also been called on to testify following claims that they've produced a blackmarket implant that allows people to search Google with their brain. Sources close to Google acknowledged they've done research on such devices, but claim none have been produced or used outside of the lab environment. Google could not be reached for official comment at press time.
Yeah, but can he remember where I left my car keys?
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But I have forgotton what this article is about.
time is a perception of a being's consciousness
time is your 6th sense, the wierd ones are 7+
...try it some time. The next time you're out of the office, try this:
;)
- Imagine you're going to send an email to everyone in your department.
- Imagine, now, that email lists are somehow unavailable.
- Starting with yourself, identify all the people in your row.
- Go one row over, and identify all those people.
Do the same for the rest of the rows.
For those of you who sit in circles in the office, just work your way around from right to left (or left to right).
You'll be surprised at how many people you can remember!
It works with restaurants, too, but since you're not likely to know those people, faces and habits will most likely stick out, rather than names.
DBA? Software Engineer? My company is hiring! Click
Power, it's more about its distribution. Some are more visual, some auditory, some learn better alone, others depend on groups, etc. Power means squat. We're talking vectors here. Oh wait, no, what was it..?
Congratulations to Ram Kolli
A guy named "Ram" who's a memory champion? come on...
"A door is what a dog is perpetually on the wrong side of" - Ogden Nash
It'd be cool to take the memory of one of these guys and combine it with the insight of Einstein, the computational abilities of John von Neumann, and maybe throw in some Hilbert, Gauss, and Riemann. Now that would be one smart mother fscker. I think mathematics and physics have an anti-memory effect though. It happened to me and others like the famously absent minded Norbert Wiener.
Anyone who isn't confused really doesn't understand the situation.
Ohwait...
...Slashdot editors could do that.
I work in a 4 person department in a 20 person company.
I ran rattle them all off. Now where's my prize?
Though sometimes I have to think about what my own phone number is.....
Read TFA and you'll have the answer in less time than it takes to say "Slashdottern lesen nicht dem fucking artikel"
"A door is what a dog is perpetually on the wrong side of" - Ogden Nash
That'd be one boring ass smart person, maybe throw a bit of Chris Rock's wit in there for fun.
Boxing Equipment Reviews
In this context such methods are fairly controversial, since the mnemonics are rather time-consuming to learn and recall is slower than brute force (on the order of 5-10 seconds instead of instantaneous), but it has some quite dedicated followers.
What are the odds that out the 24 contestants one hailed from a local high school. Now, what are the odds that the contest had "many local high school students"?
Here's an interesting memory game to try [2 more more people]
Take a deck of cards, shuffled. Remove 1 card randomly and place it face down on the side of the table. All of the players sit in a semi-circle in front of the dealer.
The dealer than plays 1 card face up in the center of the table. ~1 second later, he plays another on top of the card. Repeat 51 times, showing the players 1 card in the deck at a time. When the last card is played, cover the deck up in the middle of the table.
The players (and dealer if he didnt cheat) has seen all cards - save one. The pur-chance-guessing-game ensues: what is that card that is face-down on the side of the table?
Now that would be hilarious. I'd love to see Chris Rocks routine generalized to Banach spaces and arbitrary metrics.
Anyone who isn't confused really doesn't understand the situation.
Forget all of this.
How many of us can remember how many girlfriends we've had sex with?
Oh.--wait--I forgot where I was posting...
Vos teneo officium eram periculosus ut vos recipero is.
..but can they be mounted as a mass storage volume on Linux ?
Even though you're joking, reading this part got me to thinking of how much our concepts of time and memory at large could be altered if we were able to search through the vast archives of past memories (repressed and active) with the efficiency of Google. Can you imagine being able to remember being slapped by the doctor in a white hospital room, seeing the world for the very first time? Or how about every single dream you ever had - *ever*?
There are so many things we have yet to discover about ourselves, and about the human mind.
My digital rights don't need management.
It's that much easier to remember something like that than just three cards? I guess it's like they actually translate the entire deck into a sort of language. Then they just translate it using the same language every time.
Imagine how much the *AA would panic if every song or movie you heard or saw was a permanent part of your memory that could be recalled in full quality at any time.
Einstein's brain was probably wired completely different. I bet he would forget to pickup milk on the way home, instead, constantly thinking about something grand. I tend to be HORRIBLE at memorization, yet can solve problems others find difficult. Everybody is different, it is just a matter of what skills and to what degree we use them.
Editors that could remember the stories that they put up the day before.
I believe that because the brain is still developing, infant memories often don't survive in any form. But otherwise, yes, that would amazingly cool. Although if we were going to do computer-brain interfaces, there are of course many many other awesomely neat things you could do.
"Never attribute to malice that which can be adequately explained by stupidity." -- Hanlon's Razor
Imagine a beowulf cluster of them.
Baaaa
My other sig is crap too
"...but claim none have been..."
As any real journalist would know, it should be "...none has..."
AT&ROFLMAO
Is incredible how powerfull can the human brain be. If these people can do that imagine what could Einstein do ?
Likely, not that much better. Read the article. These people use an assortment of mnemonic devices to remember these large chunks of data. If you tried to remember a series of cards, you would get lost in the volume of data. But if you remember each three cards in order as "person action object", then you can remember the sequence of cards as a story, and that is orders of magnitude easier to remember, because it has real meaning, whereas a sequence of cards is essentially meaningless. The brain sucks at remembering things without meaning, and excels at things that have meaning. That seems to be because our memory is inherently associative. We remember things by associating them to other things. That way the more associations you can make between a new factoid and existing concepts in your brain, the more easily you'll remember it.
Well, not that much anymore, I suspect.
http://www.rootstrikers.org/
That's the funniest thing I've read all day.
Anyone who isn't confused really doesn't understand the situation.
who has Pi memorized to 450 digits. He celebrated pi day (3/14) by memorizing his 500th, and repeating them nonstop all day long. Got a bit on everyone's nerves to say the least.
Of course. I'm an excellent driver... four minutes to Wopner...
Am I the only one who glanced at the headline and thought this was a face-off of RAM technologies?
Knowledge is how to play a game, intelligence is how to win, wisdom is knowing what game to play.
Memory and inteligence are not necesarily related.
WTF am I doing replying to an AC at 5 A.M on a Friday night?
That's easy, just expand the infinite series of arctan 1 and multiply by 4.
Anyone who isn't confused really doesn't understand the situation.
oh man, I was supposed to compete this year, but I totally forgot...
I once heard an interview with one of these types who did his act as a show. He said the only time he forgot an object somone in the audience asked him to remember, it was an egg. He foolishly placed it next to a white wall in his imaginary home town. When he walked back through town, he didn't see it against the wall.
Yeah, reminds me of every cockwad who dismisses memory, IQ etc and tries to play the we are all special in our own way card.
No i bet Einstein had an awesome memory for what was important.
Hrm... I think I see a pattern there.
I have spoken to many people who remember nothing from before the age of 5 or 6. On the other hand there are a surprising number of adults who can describe, even name, songs, people, toys, places from the age of three or earlier (under accidentally controlled conditions. For instance, my family moved when I was 4, but I can describe the world that was around me before that, including my brother's birth when I was 2 1/2, and the daycare center I attended when I was 3)
Even earlier memories are still there, in every moment of our life. They just aren't the kinds of memories we recall remembering. They are just a part of us.
p.s. I don't count Salvador Dali, who claims to remember things from the womb, hehe.
In wartime... truth is so precious that she should always be attended by a bodyguard of lies. (Churchill)
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.
Can you be Even More Awesome?!
Although I'm sure a fantastic memory would be helpful right now, projects like beagle and dashboard will hopefully let those of us with horrible memory get by just as well.
Oh well, guess we have to waste money on something
I could tell the difference. The card-shuffle movies would be much better.
Can you be Even More Awesome?!
Einstein was the archetypal forgetful scientist.
"Orthodoxy means not thinking--not needing to think. Orthodoxy is unconsciousness." --Eric Blair
Well, I know the guy and his nickname is infact RAM. .(with capital letters). He is now a business analyst with CapitalOne.
Ed Cooke, who "would have destroyed the American competition", is a dear friend of mine. He learnt early on that it's polite, when swapping phone numbers, to pretend to write down the number given to you.
Why bother attending the championship?
The private "agency", that Casinos use to scope these potential card counters, probably compile a dossier of these mentats.
Don't bother, just rip the casino off while you can.
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.
//Information does not want to be free; it wants to breed.
or I woulda been moderated 'redundant' for posting Yet Another Joke about forgetting how to get to the competition.
Sometimes boldness is in fashion. Sometimes only the brave will be bold.
I agree with the two AC's. Stop propping yourself up, buddy. This is slashdot. We already know just how 'special' we are. You're no better than any of us :^)
My digital rights don't need management.
I was wondering about the lowest number of bits in which you can stick the full order of a 52 card deck into. So far I can do it in 253 bits of information. Thats about 64 hexadecimal digit number or 78 decimal digits. So you need only some 780 decimal digits to remember order of 10 decks of cards. Of course, if they are all shuffled together, its much more.
If programs would be read like poetry, most programmers would be Vogons.
Of course this isn't nearly as powerful as the methods of these champions, but it's a good trick for those of us who don't have days to practice assocating numbers with biplanes.
555-1212 is also the number for directory information (the same as 411, only you can dial an area code first).
probably the best street performer I ever saw pulled 10 or 15 people out of the audience, asking each one for their home zip code. Then he took each of them in turn, told them exactly where they live, and even mentioned restaurants and bars that they probably frequent. I was living in Manchester, England at the time (and we were in Nevada) so I thought I could stump him, but he nailed it. He got people from all over the US, Canada, Europe, the Middle East, and Asia. He produced the specific city or town, not just the country. Now that's a good memory!
As I recall, he calls himself "the zip code guy".
hey, that's my number, at least according to Best Buy, and RadioShack!
The force that blew the Big Bang continues to accelerate.
If I had mod points, I would have probably saved them for something better. But picturing Chris Rock saying...
Metric spaces, metric spaces. Met-ric spaces.
These things are all over the place now. You know the Poles have their own sorts of metric spaces. Polish spaces. Have you heard about these? They're completely metrizable separable topological spaces. What kind of an idiot do you have to be to name a separable space after your own country?
made me laugh. Oh well, to each his own.
After all, I am strangely colored.
I think you could spend a better part of a weekend discussing different comics cracking jokes about different areas in mathematics. Anything to distract from studying for quals! lol
Anyone who isn't confused really doesn't understand the situation.
I was wondering about the lowest number of bits in which you can stick the full order of a 52 card deck into. So far I can do it in 253 bits of information. Thats about 64 hexadecimal digit number or 78 decimal digits. So you need only some 780 decimal digits to remember order of 10 decks of cards.
I can do it in 226 bits; I would be surprised if it can be done in less.
But the manipulations required to encode/decode that sort of compressed representation is so complex it is useless as a mental technique unless you were the Rain Man and then you probably don't need it anyway.
I am Rain Man.
So said I.
Lines they could never use again:
Honey, I forgot your birthday....
I really was going to call you the next day - but I forgot your number.
I was going to get you that more expensive present, but I couldn't remember where it came from.
I'm sorry boss, I forgot about that deadline.
The expectations would be so high nobody would ever believe them if they said they forgot something.
And if you audiate it (that is, "hear" it in your mind), does it have a rhythm?
But for the 253 I actually used an algorithm thats very easy to process. First 51 bits tell you if card is red or black, next 25 tell you for red cards if its heart or diamond, next 25 tell for black, .. then 4*12 bits to say low or high card and so on. I think I could reconstruct the deck pretty fast from that.
If programs would be read like poetry, most programmers would be Vogons.
I read an account of an interview between a reporter and Einstein. At the end, the reporter asked for Einstein's phone number so he could phone later if he needed to check something for the article.
Einstein replied that he couldn't remember his number, but it didn't matter, because it was in the phone book.
Smart man, Albert!
Google's calculator says that 52 factorial is 226 bits long. (Searching for ln(52 factorial)/ln(2) and getting an answer is brutally cool). So there's an information theoretic lower bound assuming that all orderings are equally probable.
Yes, for secretaries and PR people. But they were all sent off on the B-ark, weren't they?
As a few people have posted now, Einstein had a terrible memory for trivial stuff like this. But who has done more to advance civilization:
The guy who can say, "Hey Bob, how you been these past 9 months, are you still at (618) 555-2324, and how are those 3 children of yours?"
Or the guy who developed the General Theory of Relativity...
I... am so confused. I can count cards well enough, but if there is some really intense system of counting cards that u guys are using here (that is easy) please explain it in easier terms for I am only slightly smarter than a simpleton :P [and probably younger and less experienced than most of you... ]
Hey, we all have to learn from someone, right?
Also, in some regions (like 201, my former digs), you can do 555-5454 (might require an area code prefix), and it'll prompt you for a phone number and, if the number is listed, it'll tell you the name and address of the person that registered that line.
At least it did that a few years ago, haven't tried since.
this isn't a sig. i type this (including the two dashes), every time i post, just to make it look like a sig.
Interesting, when was this introduced as the Ghostbusters phone number (from around 1980) is 555-2368.
it is only after a long journey that you know the strength of the horse.
What about the number lists? The best contestants memorized about 100 digits in 5 minutes. 100 digits contain log(10^100) / log(2) = 332 bits. That's 1.1 bits per second.
So, over a lifetime, the most anyone can memorize is about (1 bit/sec)*(3600 sec/hr)*(15 hr/day)*(365 day/year)*(80 years/lifetime) = 1.6 Gigabits = 200 Megabytes. Hmm.
Im glad to see this post. I also had the Loraine memory system and had a lot of fun with it in my teen years.
Guys, this stuff really isn't that hard. There is no such thing as a "bad memory." Just an untrained one. Seriously, anyone with half a brain can learn to memorize long-digit numbers or the order of a deck of cards. I consider myself a person of average intelligence and yet I can take a randomly shuffled deck of cards and view each card in order once for less than a second and then list the cards in order or name a specific card by it's index. It just takes training. People often attribute these sorts of feats to raw ability, but the truth is you can vastly improve your ability to remember through practice.
Celebrate the finer things in life
Yeah, I got two results with 253 bits using two different algorithms, but then I devised a different algorithm that uses only 216 bits.
No, you need to recheck your math, you can't do it in 216.
I would guess your solution won't even do it in the optimal 226 since your grouping wastes a fraction of a bit in each step due to the grouping of cards and there's only a small fraction of a bit to spare in the 226 solution.
Why? Why would the Alcoholics Anonymous object about that?
Or maybe not. If Einstein were so absolutely, magically, intelligent as many people believe, then he would have unified gravitation theory with quantum mechanics. What people in general don't realize is how cooperative science is. Einstein didn't create his theories out of nothing, his work was based on a lot of other theories. As Newton said, he stood on the shoulders of giants. So, maybe his brain wasn't so special, maybe he just studied harder the work of those who came before him.
Four gigs of memory are almost useless with a 486...
Stupidity is an equal opportunity striker.
Fellow slashdotter Bill Dog
Errm... that's not remembering anything new. It's simply recalling details of your office that you work in every day.
If I read out numbers that seem meaningless to you, and you use the people in your office as a mnemonic to remember them, that's different.
But personally, I've little interest in rote learning. I'd much rather understand how the world works and be able to explain it from principles than to simply have meaningless tables of data in my head. The former is applicable to more than just pre-determined questions.
For example, which would you rather know: the date at which world war two broke out, out the sequence of events since world war two, and their causality? With knowledge, you can backtrack to the right year from other dates you do remember, and, much more, you can actually use the information for new ideas and insights.
I wonder how many computer geeks have memory troubles? I have a theory that all those requesters and reminders and pop-up hints help us so much that they make us forget how to remember things. My memory is like a sieve these days. Although it could be other things, so I'm not sure.
But some of them are. For instance, I used to have a copy of U2's "Walk On" available, which is no longer the case. However, I can recall it internally with relative exactitude, down to the entrances of the background parts, vocal inflections, effects, and so forth. Moreover, it's represented in structured form, not as pure audio; when bits become less exact it's more similar to human memory becoming less exact (e.g. forgetting words from the lyric, playing it back in the wrong key since I don't usually bother to have a pitch reference handy) than classical-computer memory dropping bits (e.g. lots of noise in the audio stream).
I suppose I'm a sort of musical person, so this may not be the norm, but it is certainly not impossible for humans to store music and video in memory, at higher or lower quality as desired.
= 9J =
I was planning on going, but sadly I forgot which day it was on.
I Am My Own Worst Enemy
"Where's Ram?"
"He didn't make it."
phozz
Your Mr. Magoo method sounds much better.
A few years ago at a local watering hole we had the pleasure of hanging out with a brilliant but misguided man nicknamed 'Fletch'. After several drinks someone dared all to recite the powers of two for a whole hour. Well, we all laughed, except Fletch. He started rambling them off... "2, 4, 8, 16, 32....". He must have been doing that for about 20 minutes before he gave up, took a last swig of his beer and then left. Beyond 32768, I had no idea if he was correct with any of them or not, but it sure was interesting and fairly funny to hear.
So who do you get when you call 555-2804 in Quantico (or anywhere else for that matter ;-?
Lars T.
To the guy who modded me down from perfect to terrible Karma - Apple haters still suck