The $10K Memory Competition: learn to remember a shuffled deck of cards | Hacker News Reader

The $10K Memory Competition: learn to remember a shuffled deck of cards

memrise.com

52 pointsndr27 comments

Memrise was started by Ed Cooke, a world memory champion, and Joshue Foer's mentor in the book Moonwalk in Einstein (a great read about hacking your memory).

The basic technique for memorizing a deck of cards is known as the PAO system - person, action object, and is used in conjunction with the memory palace.

For each card, you assign a person (or character), action, and an object.

King of hearts - Paul Graham juggling watermelons King of diamonds - Michael Jackson moonwalking on a birthday cake King of clubs - Tiger Woods swinging a golf club King of spades - Homer Simpson eating a sausage

You then memorize cards in sequences of three, so if the order was the king of hearts, king of clubs, king of spades, you would imagine Paul Graham swinging a sausage. You would then store that image of PG in a location of your memory palace, which is usually a room in a house you have memorized. For each three sets of cards, you store a vivid image in a room or space of your memory palace.

The human brain has evolved to be exceptional at visual memory, so this technique utilizes your ability to remember imagery to translate interesting images to a more boring subject matter (a deck of playing cards).

At the end the deck, you can then "walk" through your memory palace, and see the strange images you have committed to memory. In the first room you would see PG swinging a sausage, and know instantly that correlates to the king of heats, king of clubs, king of spades.

Ed Cooke explains it in more detail in this video http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=x...

And here's a list of know mnemonist who use the PAO system http://mnemotechnics.org/wiki/Person-Action-Object_(PAO)_Sys...

Moonwalking with Einstein is a fun book, but remember to be wary of books about the brain that are not written by neuroscience experts. From the NYT book review:

'(Irregular images aside, Foer’s missteps are few. Discussing the neurological underpinnings of memory, he repeats some commonly held myths about it, for instance, that obscure facts — “where I celebrated my seventh birthday” — are “lurking somewhere in my brain, waiting for the right cue to pop back into consciousness.” In fact, not only are many such memories lost for good, even the memories we do have are often quasi-fictionalized reconstructions.) http://www.nytimes.com/2011/03/13/books/review/book-review-m...

[...] even the memories we do have are often quasi-fictionalized reconstructions [...]

Ever since I read about flashbulb memory[1] in my psychology textbook, I've felt uneasy about using witnesses for high-profile criminal trials.

[1]: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flashbulb_memory#Stability_over...

an eyewitness is usually worse than useless, they can be entirely misleading.

Exactly -- that's why it's so scary to think that their testimony can be so pivotal in a criminal trial.

See Joshua Foer's entertaining TED talk at http://www.ted.com/talks/joshua_foer_feats_of_memory_anyone_.... He describes the origin and working of the Memory Palace-method, the culture and some people in the world memory championships, and his own participation in the contest. A very interesting talk.

Thanks for mentioning my site (Mnemotechnics.org). If anyone wants to learn, I can show you the basics of the techniques for free in person or by webcam. I live near Berkeley, CA. Send a message through the website.

I enjoyed your comment and explanation, as I just finished reading John Crowley's book "Little, Big" in which this idea is explained and made into a kind of magic. Brilliant book and the bits that deal with the memory arts are fantastic.

About ten years ago I set out to do this using a peg memory system http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mnemonic_peg_system that I customized to card suits and numbers.

The best I could do was 4:25 and it was far more exhausting than I thought it would be. Trying as hard as possible three times in a day was my limit but the result was magical because I really knew the entire deck.

Instantly you can answer questions like, What is below the two of hearts? What how far is the ace of spades from the seven of diamonds? It felt surreal. I never noticed any improvement in other memory abilities as a side effect but it definitely felt like exercise of a mental sort.

I bet there's a way to do this.

ceil(log2(52!)/8) means it's basically 29 bytes of information you need to memorize in under a minute. The method of loci (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Method_of_loci) would probably allow you to memorize that quantity of information in a minute, but the real challenge here lies in coming up with a scheme to quickly translate a card ordering into a form suitable for memorizing.

This is going to require some more thought.

Xcelerate: you can learn the method, and practice, in the site.

Really interesting technique, thanks for sharing the method.

It's not insanely hard; it just takes some practice. The gist of what you'd do is:

* Assign a word to each card. For example, the three of spades might be "pancakes", but I think people usually have some sort of digit-to-sound mapping (eg. three would be "s", spades would be "s", giving "sauce" or something).

* To memorize the deck of cards, visualize a series of events involving the words you've chosen for the cards, interacting with each other in series.

I use this technique to memorize grocery lists sometimes. If your list with "marshmallows, tomatoes, sour cream", you could imagine:

* Walk up to the store. The doors open and millions of marshmallows pour out.

* A 20-foot-wide tomato falls out of the sky and flattens all the marshmallows

* You cut the top off the tomato and it's full of sour cream

* and so on.

Visual memory is a lot more durable than short-term memory (eg queen-of-spades, 3-of-hearts, ...). This kind of pattern is /really/ easy to remember. Building up the effortless associations from cards to trigger words, however, takes a lot of time.

29 bytes, or 229 bits, of information is a LOT.

To put it another way, you have pick out the one sequence you saw from 2^229 other similar-looking sequences.

Our brains are really good with structure, and the problem is this information has no inherent structure. It's like memorizing, not a sentence of length 29 characters, but a 29-character string of random ASCII characters. (Memorizing pi to 29 digits is a mini-feat, and that's only using 10 different characters instead of 255.)

I guess that's why all the techniques people are mentioning actually add information to the problem. Rather than trying to memorize 7S QD 3D 4C 10H ... you try to memorize some structured storyline with far more details, then pick the information out of the structure later.

For people that do this kind of stuff, does it improve your day to day memory and are there other practical uses?

I have never tried to memorize a deck of cards, but I did spend some time improving my memory a few years ago using "The Memory Book" (http://www.amazon.com/The-Memory-Book-Classic-Improving/dp/0...).

I don't know if it made much difference in my scratch memory (i.e. remembering random things that occurred, or facts that I've seen), but it made a significant difference in things I chose to remember. There's an effort required to file away facts, but once you've gotten that system down it's quite useful. I use it for remembering things like flight confirmation numbers or license plates.

FYI if you read the book Moonwalking with Einstein the author explains the methods of memorizing a deck of cards. The author learns the techniques himself to participate and win the US World Memory Championship. The author's coach in the book is Ed Cooke who is a co-founder of Memrise.

The world record stands at 21.19 seconds

(http://www.recordholders.org/en/list/memory.html#cards-speed)

Although I greatly enjoyed Moonwalking with Einstein, the problem in the end is that most of the techniques used in the field assume the ability to visualize as prerequisite (and indeed, seem to imply it's an inherently honed skill in all people). As someone who never learned visualization, is there a proper course of action one could take in preparation for these techniques, to learn to, for instance, 'picture Barack Obama' and to 'memorize a space to use as a memory palace'? It seems like there should be a similar course online for these types of skills, so that the latter memory tricks like Ed Cooke's can be studied as well.

I learned to do this trick with the following book: http://www.amazon.com/Unleash-Your-Hidden-Poker-Memory/dp/17... It takes me more than a minute though, because I don't practice often enough. The technique is based on leveraging the visualization capabilities of your brain.

For anyone interested in improving your memory and other mental skills, I strongly recommend the mentat wiki [1]. Its page on playing card memorization is here: [2]

[1] - http://www.ludism.org/mentat

[2] - http://www.ludism.org/mentat/PlayingCardFeats

Joshua Foer memorized it in 1:40 (US record at that time). I'm not sure how an average person can do it in less than a minute.

The site is awsome! I just try the simplified Madarin, it is very motivating. Juts give a try to: http://www.memrise.com/course/749/the-guardian-chinese-chall...

It looks interesting, but none of the videos work. I'm viewing the site from my phone.

There are videos on the submitted link? I don't see any... I don't think there are supposed to be any.

The links are on the get started page. There are seven videos posted. http://www.memrise.com/course/44056/the-10k-memory-competiti...

With Chrome on Desktop I get blank content where something should be

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