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Some of my favorite people...
Feb. 13th, 2013 10:57 pm...have gotten together to create an interesting competition.
Tim Ferriss, author of the popular "Four-Hour" series of books (and most recently, The Four-Hour Chef) has apparently joined forces with the folks who run the Memrise web site to stage "The $10K Memory Competition."
The bottom line is this: The first person to remember the order of a shuffled deck of cards in under a minute will be awarded a prize of $10,000, being offered by Ferriss. There are a bunch of rules, naturally, and some folks have already gamed the system (posting times of under 5 seconds for memorizing a 52-card deck, which would appear to be physically impossible, i.e., an unbroken stream of mouse-click/screen-refresh cycles taking ~80 ms each, which would seem to leave no time to actually look at images), but still... the idea is compelling (at least for me).
The only fly in the ointment, initially, had to do with having to learn to associate cards with a specific set of famous people (the first step in the process of being able to commit a sequence of cards to memory). The person associated with the King of Clubs, for example, is someone named Jay-Z, whose name was utterly unfamiliar to me (I had to Google it, in fact).
Fortunately, one enterprising user created a sample GreaseMonkey script that, suitably edited for TamperMonkey (so I could use it in Chrome), causes any name you want to be displayed in place of the ones embedded in the system. So instead of the names of people selected by someone else, I decided to make the associations my own and so populated my Clubs with famous (to me) comedians. My king, BTW, is Bob Hope, with his trademark golf club, dressed in a 50s style golfing outfit.
So far, my best time for memorizing a sequence of just 13 cards is just under a minute. I do not realistically expect to get a complete deck memorized in that potentially prize-winning time, but if I can memorize a deck in under 4 minutes, I will be suitably impressed.
As to why that might be the case is something I will leave for another post.
Cheers...
Tim Ferriss, author of the popular "Four-Hour" series of books (and most recently, The Four-Hour Chef) has apparently joined forces with the folks who run the Memrise web site to stage "The $10K Memory Competition."
The bottom line is this: The first person to remember the order of a shuffled deck of cards in under a minute will be awarded a prize of $10,000, being offered by Ferriss. There are a bunch of rules, naturally, and some folks have already gamed the system (posting times of under 5 seconds for memorizing a 52-card deck, which would appear to be physically impossible, i.e., an unbroken stream of mouse-click/screen-refresh cycles taking ~80 ms each, which would seem to leave no time to actually look at images), but still... the idea is compelling (at least for me).
The only fly in the ointment, initially, had to do with having to learn to associate cards with a specific set of famous people (the first step in the process of being able to commit a sequence of cards to memory). The person associated with the King of Clubs, for example, is someone named Jay-Z, whose name was utterly unfamiliar to me (I had to Google it, in fact).
Fortunately, one enterprising user created a sample GreaseMonkey script that, suitably edited for TamperMonkey (so I could use it in Chrome), causes any name you want to be displayed in place of the ones embedded in the system. So instead of the names of people selected by someone else, I decided to make the associations my own and so populated my Clubs with famous (to me) comedians. My king, BTW, is Bob Hope, with his trademark golf club, dressed in a 50s style golfing outfit.
So far, my best time for memorizing a sequence of just 13 cards is just under a minute. I do not realistically expect to get a complete deck memorized in that potentially prize-winning time, but if I can memorize a deck in under 4 minutes, I will be suitably impressed.
As to why that might be the case is something I will leave for another post.
Cheers...
