Memorizing a Deck of Cards | Hacker News Reader

Memorizing a Deck of Cards

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73 pointsseventyhorses39 comments

A few years ago I got down to memorizing a deck of cards in less than 2 mins.

First assign a person for each card.

Use the initials of the card. So Ten of Hearts would be someone with the initials T H(eg Ted heath, Thomas Hardy). Choose a person that is visually easy to remember.

Then when you are memorizing the cards use the method of loci. Go on an imaginative journey with 52 places and put the relevant person in that place. It helps if the place is associated with an action. It also helps if the action is weird, rude or strange because these are the things we tend to remember. Similarly bigger, more colourful loud images are easier to remember than small dull, mundane ones. If you keep having trouble with an image /place then change it

I practised everyday when I had a spare 5 mins and eventually worked up to memorizing a full deck.all in all it took about two months and I learnt alot about my memory

Did you clear out your Palace for the next deck or use a new one? Not sure what's the best strategy there, I usually find echoes of past uses at the locations I've previously cleared out. How do you deal with this?

Used the same one every time. I founded the easiest one to use was based on my house. The shorter the distance between objects the better.

Is it just me? I cannot remember my own home with full detail.

The journey can be imaginary. Try to make the places memorable. And the close your eyes and walk round the imaginary route

What is the benefit to such an exercise?

Testing your mental limits.

Cheating at cards.

And also a type of intense mental exercise that is probably healthy

It made me much better at deliberately remembering information. I also believe it improves imagination. In the first place ( incidentally a phrase that originates in mnemonics) you are practicing making mental images. The less quotidian the better. Secondly you are required to put together wildly different objects to make easy mnemonics

> In the first place ( incidentally a phrase that originates in mnemonics) [...]

Do you have a source for that or is it a gut feeling? In a quick Google search I couldn't find anything about the history of this idiom.

Here is a discussion: https://artofmemory.com/blog/first-place-second-place-5806.h....

Thank you! I will read through that later. Sorry for the late response, I didn't see your reply until just now.

Mnemonics are an easy way to remember a lot of information. Similar techniques are used for blind solving Rubik's cubes, remembering 2000+ chinese characters etc.

Would you mind giving more examples and step through of the process?

I read a book from the library called how to develop a perfect memory by Dominic o Brian.

If you need any help please contact me via the widget on https://twiktwok.github.io/faq.html

I also recommend Moonwalking with Einstein.

When I was young, must've been under ten, I used to play a card game in my guide group in where the deck was continually recycled and if played "wrong" you had to add a facedown card from the top of the deck, which replaced the current one.

The details are fuzzy, but I remember that we all pretty quickly broke the game by memorizing the full deck after playing through once or twice. So we started playing two decks shuffled together, then three.

The point being that kids' brains are magical and memorizing the order of a deck is no big deal if you're having fun doing it.

Interestingly the thing which immediately foiled our trick was playing against a different guide group which played three decks, but cut and took away half the stack before playing. Having half as many cards (but a random half) broke all our unconscious mnemonics (which apparently included a radix filter).

“Moonwalking with Einstein”, a book by Joshua Foer (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Moonwalking_with_Einstein), is all about memorization techniques and memorization competitions. It’s a great read. He found that while practicing with specific techniques allowed him to win competitions, he still tended to forget where he put his car keys.

I have a trick that works for such things (at least for me).

When I'm leaving keys I imagine myself going back and searching for them and remembering that I left them there.

Then when I really am in this situation I remember the false memory and find them :)

Same thing works with remembering to buy something when going back from work and other "do THIS when THAT". When I decide I have to buy X I imagine myself stepping out of the bus, going up the stairs, remembering to go to the shop, turning and going there.

Then when I really do this I remember to turn :) What's funny is that a few times I then decided to go out on the next stop (a little longer walk but less mud when it's raining) - and I haven't remembered because the trigger didn't happen :)

This trick loosely reminds me of Neal Stephenson's excellent Anathem; by imagining a narrative in which you've solved the problem you're trying to solve, you actually create that narrative with the solved problem; then it's just a matter of merging that narrative with your own.

This has helped me, I've also noticed it calms you down and you get a fresh focus, which is what's desperately needed in those times of panic.

> he still tended to forget where he put his car keys.

I find it just easier to develop a protocol on where the keys go. In fact, I organize my entire space so that everything has a place and as soon as I am done with it I put it back in the place. Reduces cognitive load. Since a thing is in a place every time, eventually my brain builds a detailed map of exactly where everything lives, even down to the inch within a shelf, drawer, etc. At this point I could almost operate blind.

I've heard a similar technique: always picture the keys as "living on that shelf" or "sleeping in that bowl".

I do this, but I live with people who don't.

Therein lies the rub...

Ah yeah. Things moving behind your back. It's functionally equivalent to the house being haunted.

I get the same feeling working on a shared codebase...where'd I put that dang function now...

Yes great book. I highly recommend as well it if you want to learn more about memorization techniques or just for an entertaining read about the memorization community and history of memorization techniques.

Back when I was playing competitive Pokemon, I'd remember the top 100 most used pokemon in competitions, their top 5 or 6 builds, the obscure moves that they'd use (Hidden power targets), the common stats that people would build towards (102 speed Jolly Garchomp will outrun a 110 speed Modest Gengar. +50% Dragondanced Jolly Gyarados will outrun a 130 Timid Tapu Koko), as well as OHKO targets of each pokemon (+50% boosted Jolly Gyarados will not OHKO Tapu Koko with Waterfall and is therefore forced to switch).

Because items were hidden information: it was important to memorize these details to know what items your opponent was using. A Gengar will do 30% against my Tank, but some items may increase the damage to say, 45%. If I saw that Gengar did 45% damage with Shadow Ball instead of the expected 30% damage, I knew that Gengar was equipped with Choice-Specs, and that Gengar was now locked-in on Shadow Ball (Choice-Specs gives +50% damage but forces the Pokemon to use the same move-over-and-over, meaning Gengar only has two options: use Shadow Ball again, or switch out. I can therefore better plan around the opponent, despite taking extra damage I wasn't expecting)

I'd also memorize common "cores": Celebi is commonly paired with Heatran back in Gen4 (Diamond / Pearl), because their types perfectly complement each other (especially in Gen4 when Steel was a Dark and Ghost resist). So if you saw that one player has a Celebi, it almost guarantees that they also have a Heatran on their team (Pokemon back then was a game of hidden information: you didn't know what was on the opponent's team until they threw a Pokemon out). Modern Pokemon games reveal the teams these days, so this kind of memorization is no longer needed.

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The overall metagame evolved month-to-month, requiring a new effort to memorize the newest strategies, cores, and builds to keep up with your opponents.

I'm sure there are many other games of partial-information that become memorization heavy. Magic the Gathering is probably another one (which I also played, but never "competitively").

Ex: seeing a few Human cards in Innistrad is an indicator that the player might have a Angel of Glory's Rise in their deck (resurrect all Humans, destroy all Zombies). Figuring out the opponent's "bomb card" before they play it is hugely important.

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Anyone playing a "team-building" or "deck-building" competitive game is almost surely a memorization king. I placed all of this effort into the game mostly because I knew my opponents placed that effort into the game, and that I'd need to push a similar level of effort to "keep up" with them.

I find I often procrastinate when I haven’t done adequate planning. It’s easier to proceed when the next step is clear. So this was the most interesting part of the article to me:

> There were times when I felt an urge to stop and do anything else. I often get such urges when doing other activities, but this time I was able to resist them. I think that this might be because there was also a clear next step in this task, and also because I knew that the point of the task was to train my focus.

I haven’t internalized this method yet, but I’m a fan of this video by a YouTube maker-type (“Crafsman”) explaining how to memorize numbers: https://youtu.be/zyqoCZIKsN0

Separately, I’m paranoid about forgetting people’s names, so for me (as other people are describing here) I find it helps to come up with a visualization or link their name to an idea: This guy I just met is named Dylan is bald, and Bob Dylan has crazy hair. The person up the street is named Beth like the KISS song. My favorite was a person named Mika, who was from Yakima, and who introduced herself by saying “I put the _mika_ in _Yakima_.” That was someone I barely knew more than five years ago and I’ll probably still have that one rolling around in my head if I still exist twenty years from now.

When I learned the memory palace technique I practiced it by memorizing decks of cards. My fastest memorize & recall time was about 10 minutes, which isn't very fast compared to a lot who use this technique. I also memorized the population of each country, which makes me seem more knowledgable than I am about geo-politics. It's a good brain exercise, and mental walks through these memory palaces are in my opinion a great use of my idle time when I'm stuck waiting in line or something. Much better than draining my life energy into internet novelty on my phone these days.

Did you use the memory palace technique to remember the populations? How so? Can you give a small example?

I was introduced to this from reading Moonkwalking with Einstein by Joshua Foer, and there's a few communities online you can find with a little searching. Here's an example:

The technique is known as PAO (Person, Action, Object). Each 2 digit number has a unique Person/Action/Object combo. At the time wrote my own PAO I was entrenched in a foreign language that puts the verb at the end of the sentence, so I forever think Person/Object/Action for this system now but that's not a big deal, you could conceivably use any order you want as long as you're consistent.

An example: the number 23 makes me think of Michael Jordan, so I assigned Michael Jordan/Basketball/Slam Dunk to the number 23. 84 is Winston Smith/Pen/Write in a Diary. 01 is Frodo/the One Ring/Become invisible.

To remember the number 842301 you parse the number into 2 digit strings 84/23/01 and you replace them with your POA to create a memorable mnemonic. Winston Smith putting a basketball on his finger and turning invisible. This one mnemonic is information dense, it has 6 digits. Create 17 of these and put them in your memory palace and you've memorized the first 102 digits of pi.

To memorize populations of countries I replaced the Person part of the mnemonic with some person from that country. For Russia it was Putin, for Mexico it was a Mexican friend of mine. My goal was to remember how many millions of people; the only exceptions on the list were China and India which had billions but that was easy enough to remember without a uniform mnemonic.

Russia has 146 million people. Putin/1/46. My number 01 is Frodo, 46 is the Hulk. Putin using the one ring to "hulk smash" St. Basil's Cathedral. Because the memory palace is ordinal it was also easy for me to rattle off things like "Russia's the 9th most populated country in the world".

Thank you and wow! The first read of that reply was hard work, the second less so, the third seemed almost to make sense. I'm going to have to get this book - or start trying....

For the same effect with 1/10th the effort you should check out Osterlinds "Breakthrough card system".

It's a mind blowing achievement, well worth the money. Yes, it's cheating but as a programmer who often uses stack overflow to write code for me, I'm OK with that.

https://osterlindmysteries.com/store/index.php?main_page=pro...

Using this system is like using a sorting algorithm, but for cards.

The memory palace is arguably the best technique for card memorization. Several years ago, I spent a week trying to memorize cards traditionally (rote memorization). However, this was a major failure. However, I then tried the memory palace technique, and within my first try, I memorized almost all the cards! With a couple more practice runs, I was successfully able to memorize the whole deck without any error. Give the memory palace technique a try!

There's some standard visual mnemonics for this (though you can tweak them to suit yourself).

https://artofmemory.com/wiki/Card_Memorization_Techniques

I got a lot of mileage out of Unlimited Memory by Kevin Horsley, which includes strategies for memorizing decks of cards.

It's a fun trick and it does help strengthen your day-to-day memory. I definitely recommend learning.

What's the science behind improved focus as a result of training short term memory?

I don't know of any science.

But for me personally, I find that, for very long and complicated thoughts, increasing the size of short term working memory helps to prolong the time before the moment when I start to doubt my own ability to keep track of all relevant facts.

It's good for solving problems, but less so for work with an audience, e.g. writing clearly.

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