My mom left behind some number code
puzzling.stackexchange.com
puzzling.stackexchange.com
Surely either it was luck that a person with this knowledge read the question, or an extremely large number of people read the question?
This approach generalizes to strings as well. In my field of computer networking, you're an easy search away from finding out what 0x0800 means with very little context.
Searches can also work for numbers that don't look familiar. For example, you'd immediate recognize the first few digits of π, but you might not so easily recognize π²≈9.86960440109.
It's not like the internet wasn't alive and well 20 years ago. Hell, Stack Exchange is little more than Usenet, and that was in use over 40 years ago.
Sometimes I think whether someone makes profitable use of the internet is the real social division these days.
Maybe, but she also would not have had access herself to the internet, and so a series of numbers like this would have been related to a book in the house or local library or at worst a TV show that others would have seen, and therefore much easier to find.
The first page results would have answered it already - better than the stackexchange answers quoting random slides:
925
8642
37654
627418
0401473
19223530
486854332
2531971768
85129619450
918546942937
Figure 1: Digit Memory Test by Howard (1983, in Bernstein et al., 2008:215).They reference Howard which doesn't seem to be 'available'
Here is a test of your immediate memory span (Howard, 1983). Ask someone to read to you the numbers in the top row at the rate of about one per second; then try to repeat them back in the same order. Then try the next row, and the one after that, until you make a mistake. Your immediate memory span is the maximum number of items you can repeat back perfectly.
But you have to search on the first number of each line "9836014289" because it's a table. This is why the books don't come up directly in search.
Also you can't 'see' it, you just know it's there -
https://books.google.com/books?redir_esc=y&id=ho8QAQAAIAAJ&f...
They made a point of this being your memory span, but it's definitely something which can be trained. This is something we would do as part of (professional) language transcription/translation, just recording mass amounts of numbers, because those tend to be important.
You can Google that term soon enough.
Maybe this is a good way of reframing my mess of a Home Assistant install.
Why does the coffee machine turn on at that time? Why does the ventilation system do that?
I like to think if something happens to me, my wife could impersonate my "ghost in the machine" presence for a bit.
If you and your loved ones like puzzles, sure, but it’s a stretch to say each of us should do it. For many (I’d bet “most”) it’d just be frustrating to come up with or try to decrypt the puzzle.
Do whatever makes sense for your case. I remember (but am failing to find) a story about someone who had Mario Kart on N64 and showed it to their grandfather who enjoyed it so much he bought an N64 and Mario Kart (and only that game) for himself. When they played together, the grandfather always won. Years later, after the grandfather died, they got his old game and console and occasionally played against their grandfather’s Mario Kart ghosts. They still failed to beat any of them, and that triggered fond memories.
It took me around a day to brute force the password and I ended up finding a bunch of old guitar tabs I completely forgot about. Fun times!
Remember, humans are pattern matching machines and will torture a pattern out of ANYTHING. Think horses not zebras, and it's never the compilers fault.
wish they had an IP address version
My guess is that level 11 makes sense to most people, because it's the same amount of numbers as a full phone number, so you can get a cadence going.
2-232-340-1010 is pretty easy to remember, because it already exists as a common cadence, even if it's not in the US format like I use.
To me it seemed like numbers which could be split into two equal groups were the easiest. 235 431, 4475 3268 etc.
I also sang the numbers in my head and tried to memorize by repeating the melody after the numbers disappeared.
There is probably a reason why level 11 seems to be so prevalent. Phone numbers could be a factor, but to be honest, I don't know a single phone number by heart, which is probably due to my young age. Never had to memorize a phone number...
The best training for me are probably 2FA codes, so up to 6 digits I should have it covered ;)
EDIT: I realize that I just called you old. Sorry.
So you could read it as hex and score 20% more? Cheater!
(That's the first and only answer)