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posted by cmn32480 on Wednesday November 11 2015, @07:43PM   Printer-friendly
from the I-forgot-what-I-was-going-to-write dept.

If you wanted to pinpoint the most absurdly geeky event in the world calendar, it would be difficult to beat the binary numbers challenge at the World Memory Championships. In it, a bevy of trained memory masters fight it out over 30 minutes to memorise as many 1s and 0s in order as they possibly can.

Back when this was my idea of a good time, I was able to "do" more than 2,000 1s and 0s in the half-hour. My then arch-rival, Dr Gunther Karsten of Germany, was not afraid to tell me this level of performance was "really quite lame". He could do 3,200. The current world record is over 4,000: more than two 1s and 0s every second.

Dig past the mystery of such feats, and you discover a set of techniques and an approach to learning that is full of strikingly simple wisdom and fun. Even if, quite sensibly, you've no interest in learning to recite computer code, the memory techniques that enable such performance are a treasure trove of insight into how to motivate and direct the learning brain.


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  • (Score: 1, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday November 12 2015, @12:03AM

    by Anonymous Coward on Thursday November 12 2015, @12:03AM (#261986)

    You can compress into streaks and remember whether it started on zero or one.

    01010010101010101010100011110010
    start=0
    streak_length=1111 2 111111111111111 342 11

    Then compress into streaks of streaks:

    4 , 1
    1 , 2
    15, 1
    1 , 3
    1 , 4
    1 , 2
    2, 1

    One initial value and seven pairs would be doable.

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