I've probably said enough about the Extreme Memory Tournament now, but if you're still eager to read more, check out Nelson's summary!
Anyway, it's another long weekend, and just maybe I'll spend the next couple of days memory training. I'm even inclined to create a big database of names and faces and do some practice of that. I just get the feeling that I should do that, for a change. And did you know that you can upload a photo to Google images and it'll give you hundreds of similar images? It's a great way to get lots and lots of background-free head-and-shoulders photos for your training!
Saturday, May 03, 2014
Friday, May 02, 2014
The UKXMT
I really want to organise a UK Extreme Memory Tournament. Nelson and Simon are all in favour of having local competitions happen as much as possible; all I need now is for someone to give me really quite a lot of money in order to make it happen. I'm thinking of a three-day extravaganza, with the Friendly Competition in the WMSC style included in there as well.
Could I get 16 British competitors? Actually, probably quite easily, there's a lot more of us now than there used to be. Could I get 32, and expand it to World Cup proportions? I'd want to make it UK-and-Ireland, actually, so I can invite Conor Muldoon and Charlie Garavan. And for that matter, maybe we should add Americans and Australians, too, so that Nelson and Simon can compete? Okay, now it's the English-Speaking Countries Extreme Memory Tournament! If we spread our net any further than that, then those Europeans will just win everything again...
Okay, who's competing? I'm not, since I'm hypothetically running the thing and learning how Simon's software works so that I can keep it going while he's competing, but I'm sure there'd be plenty of interest!
Could I get 16 British competitors? Actually, probably quite easily, there's a lot more of us now than there used to be. Could I get 32, and expand it to World Cup proportions? I'd want to make it UK-and-Ireland, actually, so I can invite Conor Muldoon and Charlie Garavan. And for that matter, maybe we should add Americans and Australians, too, so that Nelson and Simon can compete? Okay, now it's the English-Speaking Countries Extreme Memory Tournament! If we spread our net any further than that, then those Europeans will just win everything again...
Okay, who's competing? I'm not, since I'm hypothetically running the thing and learning how Simon's software works so that I can keep it going while he's competing, but I'm sure there'd be plenty of interest!
Thursday, May 01, 2014
RIP Bob Hoskins
Yes, it really is sad that the star of Who Framed Roger Rabbit has died, it was a completely wonderful movie that I really love, and he was awesome in it. It's just that I'm confused.
See, I'd always had the idea that Bob Hoskins was famous for something else, before he starred in one of the universe's greatest cartoon-human-interaction movies of all time. I was under the general impression that he was a renowned star of other famous movies or something like that, who appeared in that film as a bit of light relief from a serious career in proper films that people who aren't me really thought were great.
So it's a bit strange to see all the news stories describing Bob Hoskins as "the star of Who Framed Roger Rabbit and other movies". Was I just imagining the whole thing? It's true that I always got him mixed up with Phil Collins, so maybe that's what I was thinking of, but then Phil Collins wasn't famous in films before 1988, and I didn't see Buster until a couple of years later... maybe they've got a third twin brother out there too, and that's who I was thinking of?
See, I'd always had the idea that Bob Hoskins was famous for something else, before he starred in one of the universe's greatest cartoon-human-interaction movies of all time. I was under the general impression that he was a renowned star of other famous movies or something like that, who appeared in that film as a bit of light relief from a serious career in proper films that people who aren't me really thought were great.
So it's a bit strange to see all the news stories describing Bob Hoskins as "the star of Who Framed Roger Rabbit and other movies". Was I just imagining the whole thing? It's true that I always got him mixed up with Phil Collins, so maybe that's what I was thinking of, but then Phil Collins wasn't famous in films before 1988, and I didn't see Buster until a couple of years later... maybe they've got a third twin brother out there too, and that's who I was thinking of?
Tuesday, April 29, 2014
Continued!
I'm finally home! Here's what I wrote on the train while trying to get here...
Back home, sort of. What with tube strikes and then signal problems at Kettering cancelling all the trains going from St Pancras, getting back from the airport turns out to be a lot more tricky than usual. I'm currently speeding towards Grantham, in the hopes of getting a train to Nottingham and then to Derby and Belper. Still, it gives me time to carry on writing about the Extreme Memory Tournament. The wifi on the train isn't working ("this is caused by a technical fault," the tannoy has just helpfully told us), but eventually I might get somewhere that allows me to post another blog entry, maybe.
Where was I? Oh yes, we'd just finished the quarter-finals. Things were running late (this was a revolutionary and different kind of memory competition in many ways, but not in that way) so the schedule was rejigged - Roddy Roediger's presentation about the study of memory athletes, then a lunch break, then someone else's presentation about identifying the precise bits of a fruit-fly's brain that relate to memory (which included colourful 3D movies of microscopic brains), and then finally back to the competition.
This gave everyone time to think a bit more about the first surprise task (we were only given ten minutes strategizing-time before starting it, so most of the detailed analysis came later), and to conclude that most of the competitors would have been beaten by an opponent who immediately threw his recall papers away and stopped the clock without trying to memorise anything - 81 three-second penalties for a final score of just over four minutes. Anyone who had just memorised the three ten-digit numbers (memory and recall of those could have been done within thirty seconds) would have ended up with a score of three minutes, which would have been the best score of the day. Probably contrary to the spirit of the rules, though...
In the gap between quarters and semis, I was chatting with some of the others, and mentioned that Jonas and I had both guessed the three of hearts in our surprise round. "I guessed the three of hearts, too!" gasped Boris. What are the odds of that? Well, as anyone who's considered a three-card-image system will tell you, the odds are 1 in 140,608. This inspired us to ask the other quarter-finalists what they'd written down. It turned out that most of them had left it blank; the only other person who'd taken a guess was Mark, and he'd written... the three of hearts. 1 in 7,311,616.
This inspired various theories about what nudged everyone's brains in that direction. Hearts was the first option on the recall sheet (you wrote down a number and circled the appropriate suit symbol) and there were a lot of threes floating around at the time - three piles of cards, three sets of numbers, three recall papers of which the missing card was written on the third, three seconds penalty for a mistake - so it perhaps isn't all that surprising. Still cool, though.
Speaking of surprises, the surprise task for the semi-finals related to the presentation we'd just seen - the DNA sequence of one of the strange things they'd done to generations of unfortunate fruit-flies in the name of science, or in other words a long string of the letters A, C, G and T. One point for a correct recall, minus one for incorrect. Again, it wasn't until afterwards that someone came up with the intriguing idea of treating them as binary digits - A being 1, all the others being 0, and only writing down the As. That might have got a much better score than any of the semi-finalists came up with.
As it was, Simon won in his semi-final against Mark Anthony, and Jonas won against Johannes. For the second round, Mark chose numbers, the only one of the four disciplines that Simon hadn't set the highest score in, having tried three fast times but made three mistakes. No mistakes this time, though, and Simon went 2-0 up. Johannes chose words, but lost (just barely) to Jonas - a 2-0 lead for the Swede too.
Simon then picked names, and comfortably moved into a 3-0 lead. Jonas picked names too, and won too, 3-0 to him.
That left Mark to choose, and there were a few mumblings of surprise when he picked cards, against the undisputed world's best card-memoriser. But if you think about it, his only other option was words, at which Simon is also by far the better of the two of them - and in cards, there's a much higher chance of making a mistake and getting a low score. No mistakes here, though, and Simon "the hitman" Reinhard (after reading my previous blog post, James told me that that's a better nickname for him) moved into the final with a second consecutive 4-0 win. Unstoppable.
As for Jonas "the feet of memory" von Essen (he competes barefoot, like some modern-day memory-competition Zola Budd), he was also given cards for the discipline that could take him into the final, but, well, you could practically hear the sound of his brain collapsing under the pressure. Johannes stopped the clock with a respectable time, Jonas took the whole 60 seconds to look at his cards, and then spent the 4-minute recall staring at the screen and being barely able to remember a single one.
That made it 3-1. Then it became 3-2 (words), and then 3-3 (numbers), as Jonas continued to fall a long way short of the kind of scores he'd been producing in the morning. Not that he could have done anything about Johannes's new world record 15.98 seconds in the numbers, though! Jonas had the choice for the final decisive round, and opted for that old favourite, names.
Watching this match was the absolute highlight of the weekend - not for the high standard of recall from two seriously-stressed-out competitors, but for the sheer excitement! Over the course of four minutes' recall, the two of them struggled to fill in names - first one was winning, then the other. Johannes got up to twelve correct names, shook his head, changed one of the correct names to an incorrect one and fell back to eleven points. Jonas got up to ten, remembered that one of the men was called Sidney, wrote that name into two of the blank spaces, moved his cursor to the real Sidney... and didn't write anything. The recall time ran out, the audience collectively exhaled (seriously, I don't think anyone had so much as breathed for at least the last two minutes), and Hannes celebrated a comeback victory, 4-3 to take him to the final!
So my predictions for the final didn't quite work out - Jonas looked pretty devastated, as you can imagine, but he seemed to perk up after some extensive hug-therapy from his girlfriend. A grand final between Simon and Johannes brought back memories of the German TV show where they had to compete against each other for the honour of facing me in the grand final - sadly, the XMT picks its grand finalists based on merit, so that didn't happen here. Florian Dellé, who'd been extensively live-streaming the whole tournament, cheerfully pointed out that seven of his eight predictions for the quarter-final lineup had been correct - I asked who the exception was, and it turned out it was me. Some people have no faith in my powers of fortuitously getting through on a tie-break, it's shocking. But Florian is now proudly sporting a hat and beard, so I can't stay mad at him.
Before we got to the final, there was the important matter of the third/fourth place play-off. Simon and Hannes were locked in the cupboard again, since the final would be using the same surprise task, and everyone else gathered around to watch as Jonas and Mark were presented with their Extreme Memory Task. A truncated chessboard, 5x8, would be placed in front of them, and on each square would be 0, 1, 2 or 3 coins. There were four different kinds of coin (those poor Americans only really have four kinds) and they could be either heads or tails. The competitors had one minute to look at the board, then four minutes to take a pile of coins and place the correct denomination with the correct orientation on the correct square. One point for a completely-right coin, minus one point for any wrong coins placed on the board.
It was a tricky one. I'm still not sure exactly what the best strategy would be - the various permutations are hard to turn into decimal numbers without a lot of unnecessary repetition. Jonas won with a score of 10, but I suspect bigger scores could be achieved with a bit of work and a lot more than ten minutes to prepare.
The surprise tasks were all completely awesome, by the way. I really want to arrange my own Extreme tournament now, just because I've already had ideas for two really great surprise tasks that I want to confront competitors with. The UK Extreme Memory Tournament is a definite possibility, if only I can get the resources to stage it.
Jonas went on to win at names, words and cards without any real difficulty, to take that coveted third place. A great performance all round!
And so to the grand final! This one was best of nine, just to make it even more special, with two extreme tasks. The first was the coins again, and Simon won. He then won cards, with Johannes trying a fast time and not getting it right, then chose names and won that too, for a 3-0 lead.
Then it was time for our final Extreme task, which turned out to be spoken numbers-and-letters. Nelson read out a list of random numbers and letters, at roughly one a second (no recordings here, it was live and extreme), and the competitors had to take turns recalling one at a time, with the first mistake losing, like they do in the US Championship. The first list was ten items, then fifteen, and so on. Only it didn't go so on, because Hannes made a mistake in recalling there. 4-0 to Simon - is he really that much better than the rest of us at extremeness?
Well, we can take comfort in the fact that he's not quite perfect. As the loser of the surprise task, Johannes chose numbers, and Simon stopped the clock at 18.54 seconds, confidently typed them out in the recall, before stopping in confusion when he realised he'd only got 14 images in his head rather than 15 (he's got a super-extreme 4-digit system). The great thing about this competition is that we could all watch on the screen and see exactly what was going through his head as he figured out where the missing image must have come in the sequence, and took a guess at what it might have been. But it wasn't right, and we were 4-1. Comeback on the cards?
Not quite. After suggesting that he should have been able to select names, since they last did it three rounds ago including the surprise round, Simon opted for words, and won it with a confident score of 43. The hitman became the first ever Extreme Memory Champion, and richly deserved it was too - he was a class apart from everyone else all weekend!
I can't wait for the next XMT! Huge thanks to Nelson, Simon O, and everyone else who made it possible!
Back home, sort of. What with tube strikes and then signal problems at Kettering cancelling all the trains going from St Pancras, getting back from the airport turns out to be a lot more tricky than usual. I'm currently speeding towards Grantham, in the hopes of getting a train to Nottingham and then to Derby and Belper. Still, it gives me time to carry on writing about the Extreme Memory Tournament. The wifi on the train isn't working ("this is caused by a technical fault," the tannoy has just helpfully told us), but eventually I might get somewhere that allows me to post another blog entry, maybe.
Where was I? Oh yes, we'd just finished the quarter-finals. Things were running late (this was a revolutionary and different kind of memory competition in many ways, but not in that way) so the schedule was rejigged - Roddy Roediger's presentation about the study of memory athletes, then a lunch break, then someone else's presentation about identifying the precise bits of a fruit-fly's brain that relate to memory (which included colourful 3D movies of microscopic brains), and then finally back to the competition.
This gave everyone time to think a bit more about the first surprise task (we were only given ten minutes strategizing-time before starting it, so most of the detailed analysis came later), and to conclude that most of the competitors would have been beaten by an opponent who immediately threw his recall papers away and stopped the clock without trying to memorise anything - 81 three-second penalties for a final score of just over four minutes. Anyone who had just memorised the three ten-digit numbers (memory and recall of those could have been done within thirty seconds) would have ended up with a score of three minutes, which would have been the best score of the day. Probably contrary to the spirit of the rules, though...
In the gap between quarters and semis, I was chatting with some of the others, and mentioned that Jonas and I had both guessed the three of hearts in our surprise round. "I guessed the three of hearts, too!" gasped Boris. What are the odds of that? Well, as anyone who's considered a three-card-image system will tell you, the odds are 1 in 140,608. This inspired us to ask the other quarter-finalists what they'd written down. It turned out that most of them had left it blank; the only other person who'd taken a guess was Mark, and he'd written... the three of hearts. 1 in 7,311,616.
This inspired various theories about what nudged everyone's brains in that direction. Hearts was the first option on the recall sheet (you wrote down a number and circled the appropriate suit symbol) and there were a lot of threes floating around at the time - three piles of cards, three sets of numbers, three recall papers of which the missing card was written on the third, three seconds penalty for a mistake - so it perhaps isn't all that surprising. Still cool, though.
Speaking of surprises, the surprise task for the semi-finals related to the presentation we'd just seen - the DNA sequence of one of the strange things they'd done to generations of unfortunate fruit-flies in the name of science, or in other words a long string of the letters A, C, G and T. One point for a correct recall, minus one for incorrect. Again, it wasn't until afterwards that someone came up with the intriguing idea of treating them as binary digits - A being 1, all the others being 0, and only writing down the As. That might have got a much better score than any of the semi-finalists came up with.
As it was, Simon won in his semi-final against Mark Anthony, and Jonas won against Johannes. For the second round, Mark chose numbers, the only one of the four disciplines that Simon hadn't set the highest score in, having tried three fast times but made three mistakes. No mistakes this time, though, and Simon went 2-0 up. Johannes chose words, but lost (just barely) to Jonas - a 2-0 lead for the Swede too.
Simon then picked names, and comfortably moved into a 3-0 lead. Jonas picked names too, and won too, 3-0 to him.
That left Mark to choose, and there were a few mumblings of surprise when he picked cards, against the undisputed world's best card-memoriser. But if you think about it, his only other option was words, at which Simon is also by far the better of the two of them - and in cards, there's a much higher chance of making a mistake and getting a low score. No mistakes here, though, and Simon "the hitman" Reinhard (after reading my previous blog post, James told me that that's a better nickname for him) moved into the final with a second consecutive 4-0 win. Unstoppable.
As for Jonas "the feet of memory" von Essen (he competes barefoot, like some modern-day memory-competition Zola Budd), he was also given cards for the discipline that could take him into the final, but, well, you could practically hear the sound of his brain collapsing under the pressure. Johannes stopped the clock with a respectable time, Jonas took the whole 60 seconds to look at his cards, and then spent the 4-minute recall staring at the screen and being barely able to remember a single one.
That made it 3-1. Then it became 3-2 (words), and then 3-3 (numbers), as Jonas continued to fall a long way short of the kind of scores he'd been producing in the morning. Not that he could have done anything about Johannes's new world record 15.98 seconds in the numbers, though! Jonas had the choice for the final decisive round, and opted for that old favourite, names.
Watching this match was the absolute highlight of the weekend - not for the high standard of recall from two seriously-stressed-out competitors, but for the sheer excitement! Over the course of four minutes' recall, the two of them struggled to fill in names - first one was winning, then the other. Johannes got up to twelve correct names, shook his head, changed one of the correct names to an incorrect one and fell back to eleven points. Jonas got up to ten, remembered that one of the men was called Sidney, wrote that name into two of the blank spaces, moved his cursor to the real Sidney... and didn't write anything. The recall time ran out, the audience collectively exhaled (seriously, I don't think anyone had so much as breathed for at least the last two minutes), and Hannes celebrated a comeback victory, 4-3 to take him to the final!
So my predictions for the final didn't quite work out - Jonas looked pretty devastated, as you can imagine, but he seemed to perk up after some extensive hug-therapy from his girlfriend. A grand final between Simon and Johannes brought back memories of the German TV show where they had to compete against each other for the honour of facing me in the grand final - sadly, the XMT picks its grand finalists based on merit, so that didn't happen here. Florian Dellé, who'd been extensively live-streaming the whole tournament, cheerfully pointed out that seven of his eight predictions for the quarter-final lineup had been correct - I asked who the exception was, and it turned out it was me. Some people have no faith in my powers of fortuitously getting through on a tie-break, it's shocking. But Florian is now proudly sporting a hat and beard, so I can't stay mad at him.
Before we got to the final, there was the important matter of the third/fourth place play-off. Simon and Hannes were locked in the cupboard again, since the final would be using the same surprise task, and everyone else gathered around to watch as Jonas and Mark were presented with their Extreme Memory Task. A truncated chessboard, 5x8, would be placed in front of them, and on each square would be 0, 1, 2 or 3 coins. There were four different kinds of coin (those poor Americans only really have four kinds) and they could be either heads or tails. The competitors had one minute to look at the board, then four minutes to take a pile of coins and place the correct denomination with the correct orientation on the correct square. One point for a completely-right coin, minus one point for any wrong coins placed on the board.
It was a tricky one. I'm still not sure exactly what the best strategy would be - the various permutations are hard to turn into decimal numbers without a lot of unnecessary repetition. Jonas won with a score of 10, but I suspect bigger scores could be achieved with a bit of work and a lot more than ten minutes to prepare.
The surprise tasks were all completely awesome, by the way. I really want to arrange my own Extreme tournament now, just because I've already had ideas for two really great surprise tasks that I want to confront competitors with. The UK Extreme Memory Tournament is a definite possibility, if only I can get the resources to stage it.
Jonas went on to win at names, words and cards without any real difficulty, to take that coveted third place. A great performance all round!
And so to the grand final! This one was best of nine, just to make it even more special, with two extreme tasks. The first was the coins again, and Simon won. He then won cards, with Johannes trying a fast time and not getting it right, then chose names and won that too, for a 3-0 lead.
Then it was time for our final Extreme task, which turned out to be spoken numbers-and-letters. Nelson read out a list of random numbers and letters, at roughly one a second (no recordings here, it was live and extreme), and the competitors had to take turns recalling one at a time, with the first mistake losing, like they do in the US Championship. The first list was ten items, then fifteen, and so on. Only it didn't go so on, because Hannes made a mistake in recalling there. 4-0 to Simon - is he really that much better than the rest of us at extremeness?
Well, we can take comfort in the fact that he's not quite perfect. As the loser of the surprise task, Johannes chose numbers, and Simon stopped the clock at 18.54 seconds, confidently typed them out in the recall, before stopping in confusion when he realised he'd only got 14 images in his head rather than 15 (he's got a super-extreme 4-digit system). The great thing about this competition is that we could all watch on the screen and see exactly what was going through his head as he figured out where the missing image must have come in the sequence, and took a guess at what it might have been. But it wasn't right, and we were 4-1. Comeback on the cards?
Not quite. After suggesting that he should have been able to select names, since they last did it three rounds ago including the surprise round, Simon opted for words, and won it with a confident score of 43. The hitman became the first ever Extreme Memory Champion, and richly deserved it was too - he was a class apart from everyone else all weekend!
I can't wait for the next XMT! Huge thanks to Nelson, Simon O, and everyone else who made it possible!
If only I was 0.35 seconds quicker
It's been a sort of extreme memory-family reunion this weekend - not just with fifteen other memory masters and their families and friends, but a whole pile of American competitors standing by to take part if necessary (it wasn't) and helping out with the organisation, the Washington University in St Louis gang, casino-cheating expert and card wizard Sal, mnemotechnics.org webmaster Josh and two entirely non-memory-related local friends, I've been constantly surrounded by a horde of people I know, some of whom I hadn't seen for ages. But now I'm in San Diego airport, on the way home (the plane's delayed by half an hour, exactly like the one on the way out - it's probably the same plane, and has been running thirty minutes late for months) and need to try to summarise everything that happened at the Extreme Memory Tournament for the benefit of my loyal bloglings.
I hope everyone was following the action on the internet, because that site and all the software really was amazing. Never in the history of "memory sports" have we had the ability to watch everything going on, even from far far away (like in Australia, where Simon Orton was at work non-stop, patching up minor bugs as soon as they arose). Live coverage of which cards the competitors were looking at at any given moment, and the ability to follow along with the excitement as they recalled! You can see the results of every match on there now, if you're interested.
Although Group D was very much the group of death, it did come last alphabetically, meaning I had the opportunity to watch the other three groups have their first match before my turn. Plus, my first match was names, against Simon "the iceman" Reinhard, which I was never going to win, so there was no need to worry about getting off to a worse-than-expected start. It wasn't until the second match, numbers against James "the one who decided that Simon's nickname is 'the iceman'" Paterson that I got off to a worse-than-expected continuation, setting a 'safe', slow-ish time of 25 seconds but not being able to remember one of the images.
When one competitor stops his or her timer, the border around the other competitor's screen turned blue, signifying that they could take the full one minute and concentrate on getting a perfect score - James did just that, and won. It was worrying, because I was significantly more sluggish there in the competition than I had been in training.
I pulled it together against Bat-Erdene in the words, and also got a win against him in numbers later (he went for an extremely fast time and didn't quite get the recall right). But those were the only two of my six matches before lunch that I won, and it really wasn't looking good for me at the half-way point. Simon was crushing everyone in his path except for one slip-up against Bat in numbers, but if I wanted to scrape into second place, I really would have to buck my ideas up in the afternoon.
The hectic pace had made it hard to keep up with what was happening in the other three groups, in between my own matches every half hour, but Jonas was the star of the day, winning everything in group C - the other three places were extremely close together and the tension was running high, as everyone could tell from Boris's loudly-yelled rude word in German when he made a mistake in the numbers against Andi. Group A was seeming pretty easy for Johannes (he got the group of life, or of undeath, or of whatever the best word for the easy group is), with Gunther and Mark Anthony closely matched behind him. Ola and Christian were fending off the challenge of Erwin over in Group B.
After lunch, I was thrown into action against Simon in words, another guaranteed loss - two wins out of seven now. I could afford to take it easy against James in cards, with 45 seconds, but I was disturbingly feeling like that was as fast as I could manage to go, with my mind not being fully up to speed. Three wins out of eight. Six out of twelve was realistically the minimum I needed.
That left names against Bat-Erdene to be a real must-win. Since I tend to regard names as being more of an inevitably-will-lose, that was worrying, but on the other hand, he's not so great at names either, so I did have a chance. And I won, just barely. I cheered "Yes!" quite loudly, before even remembering to shake hands, in all the excitement. Four out of nine. Simon had beaten James in the names, too - I really needed Simon to win his matches against my rivals if I was going to finish second, so that was a relief. That put me into second place, ahead of James on the XMT equivalent of goal difference (% recall).
Numbers against Simon, and he stopped the timer in a super-fast sub-15-seconds time - he had by that point set the best score in three of the four disciplines, just needed numbers to complete the set, and had no reason not to try as fast as he could and not really care if he made a mistake. Luckily for me, he did. Five out of ten.
Words against James. I messed it up, getting everything one place out of sequence and not being able to correct myself in time. Wouldn't have made a difference anyway - he'd scored enough to beat me if I had had the time to correct myself. Five out of eleven, back into third place in the group, all to play for in the final round.
Which was cards against Bat-Erdene, who'd not had a good day and was already out of the running. I stopped the clock on 43 seconds and did manage to recall it correctly, much to my relief. But wait - had Simon messed things up against James? Luckily, not quite. He had gone for a fast time and only got 42 cards right, but that was still just more than James. He was only eight cards away, as Boris and Johannes happily informed me immediately after the match. But no matter! I'd qualified for the second day's competition, just barely, on tie-break, with six wins and six losses!
My opponent in the quarter-final would be the winner of Group C. That was Jonas, who had completely killed his opposition, winning everything except for one late attempt at a super-fast numbers time long after he'd sealed first place in the group and had nothing to lose. Boris had also edged through in second place on tie-break over Andi, but as they say in Germany, a good horse only jumps as high as it has to.
Boris's cousin says that, anyway, on Facebook. I can't promise that everybody in Germany says it.
Ola and Christian qualified from Group B with no real difficulty. Johannes won Group A comfortably, and Mark Anthony prevented a completely European quarter-final lineup by finishing second there.
So the second day started with the first two quarter-finals - me against Jonas, Johannes against Christian. Four Germans and four Miscellaneous in the quarters, but we'd landed in two all-German ties and two all-Misc, so we didn't need to worry about a Teutonic whitewash. The other quarter-finalists were sealed away in a soundproof cupboard so they wouldn't find out what the surprise task was, and we got started.
It turned out to be an interesting challenge - a pack of cards would be split into three piles of seventeen (with the spare card put aside), and beside each pile was a piece of card with a ten-digit number on it. We had to, in this order, look at the first pile of cards, look at the number, recall them on a piece of paper, look at card pile two, look at the second number, recall that, repeat one more time for the third set, and finish. Fastest time wins, but every mistake in recall adds three seconds to your time. Correctly identify the missing card on the final box on the third recall sheet and knock ten seconds off your total time.
I went extremely quickly, more in hope that I could remember such a small amount of information with ease than out of a deliberate strategy. I had a lot of gaps in the cards recall, but I was gratified to see that Jonas was taking much longer, and finished a minute and a half after I did. I just took a guess at the missing card, writing down the three of hearts. First thing that popped into my head.
So then we added up the scores, and yes, I'd won - Jonas, a bit rattled by my speed, had made a fair few mistakes too. I noticed with some amusement that he'd also guessed at the three of hearts. But that made it 1-0 to me! First to four wins it.
From then on we were back to the four disciplines from day one. The loser of the surprise task got to pick which discipline to do next, and after that the choice alternated, with the restriction that you couldn't select either of the disciplines from the previous two matches. Jonas selected names, knowing that it would be an easy win. It was, although my score of 14 wasn't too far behind his 18. Score 1-1.
I chose cards for the next one. I'd woken up feeling a bit more positive about my abilities than when I'd gone to bed, but just to reassure myself further I'd done one practice run of cards, stopping the clock in 24.35 seconds and recalling perfectly. So I knew I could do it. I also knew that Jonas had never done a pack of cards in under 30 seconds. In the quarter-final, I stopped the clock at 28, got it all right, and moved 2-1 ahead.
Jonas chose words. I got a very creditable 37, but he managed 40. 2-2.
Left with a choice of numbers or names in round five, which isn't much of a choice, I went for numbers. I stopped the clock at an extremely fast 19.81 seconds, and had to spend a tense recall period wondering if I'd got the recall all right. It turned out that I had, but it also turned out that Jonas had stopped his own clock at 19.47, so immediately before mine that I hadn't noticed the screen turn blue. And he'd got his recall correct, too. 3-2 to him.
After that, it was a bit of a formality. Naturally he chose names for the next match, and equally naturally, he won. 4-2 and Jonas goes to the semis, but really, I was happy with my performance, I couldn't have done any better - no shame in losing in that way.
Johannes had beaten Christian by an identical score. He not unreasonably pointed out that a surprise task involving lots of picking things up, putting them down and writing is unfair to people with muscular dystrophy or any other kind of physical issues, so perhaps for the future we'll have more exclusively-mental surprises, but it didn't matter in the end.
The other four quarter-finalists were released from captivity and had their own battles. Ola slipped up twice in cards, which should have been his specialist subject, and lost 4-1 to Mark, surprising everyone. Rather less surprising was a flawless 4-0 victory for Simon over Boris. He was just unstoppable. In an interview with a New York Times reporter called Ben (I don't normally remember journalists' names, but this one was quite easy), I predicted that the final would be Simon against Jonas, with Simon to win. I'd been saying that all weekend, and saw no reason to change my predictions now.
(We'll be boarding in ten to fifteen minutes, apparently. I don't think I'm going to finish this marathon blog entry in time. We'll have to say "To Be Continued...", I'm afraid.)
I hope everyone was following the action on the internet, because that site and all the software really was amazing. Never in the history of "memory sports" have we had the ability to watch everything going on, even from far far away (like in Australia, where Simon Orton was at work non-stop, patching up minor bugs as soon as they arose). Live coverage of which cards the competitors were looking at at any given moment, and the ability to follow along with the excitement as they recalled! You can see the results of every match on there now, if you're interested.
Although Group D was very much the group of death, it did come last alphabetically, meaning I had the opportunity to watch the other three groups have their first match before my turn. Plus, my first match was names, against Simon "the iceman" Reinhard, which I was never going to win, so there was no need to worry about getting off to a worse-than-expected start. It wasn't until the second match, numbers against James "the one who decided that Simon's nickname is 'the iceman'" Paterson that I got off to a worse-than-expected continuation, setting a 'safe', slow-ish time of 25 seconds but not being able to remember one of the images.
When one competitor stops his or her timer, the border around the other competitor's screen turned blue, signifying that they could take the full one minute and concentrate on getting a perfect score - James did just that, and won. It was worrying, because I was significantly more sluggish there in the competition than I had been in training.
I pulled it together against Bat-Erdene in the words, and also got a win against him in numbers later (he went for an extremely fast time and didn't quite get the recall right). But those were the only two of my six matches before lunch that I won, and it really wasn't looking good for me at the half-way point. Simon was crushing everyone in his path except for one slip-up against Bat in numbers, but if I wanted to scrape into second place, I really would have to buck my ideas up in the afternoon.
The hectic pace had made it hard to keep up with what was happening in the other three groups, in between my own matches every half hour, but Jonas was the star of the day, winning everything in group C - the other three places were extremely close together and the tension was running high, as everyone could tell from Boris's loudly-yelled rude word in German when he made a mistake in the numbers against Andi. Group A was seeming pretty easy for Johannes (he got the group of life, or of undeath, or of whatever the best word for the easy group is), with Gunther and Mark Anthony closely matched behind him. Ola and Christian were fending off the challenge of Erwin over in Group B.
After lunch, I was thrown into action against Simon in words, another guaranteed loss - two wins out of seven now. I could afford to take it easy against James in cards, with 45 seconds, but I was disturbingly feeling like that was as fast as I could manage to go, with my mind not being fully up to speed. Three wins out of eight. Six out of twelve was realistically the minimum I needed.
That left names against Bat-Erdene to be a real must-win. Since I tend to regard names as being more of an inevitably-will-lose, that was worrying, but on the other hand, he's not so great at names either, so I did have a chance. And I won, just barely. I cheered "Yes!" quite loudly, before even remembering to shake hands, in all the excitement. Four out of nine. Simon had beaten James in the names, too - I really needed Simon to win his matches against my rivals if I was going to finish second, so that was a relief. That put me into second place, ahead of James on the XMT equivalent of goal difference (% recall).
Numbers against Simon, and he stopped the timer in a super-fast sub-15-seconds time - he had by that point set the best score in three of the four disciplines, just needed numbers to complete the set, and had no reason not to try as fast as he could and not really care if he made a mistake. Luckily for me, he did. Five out of ten.
Words against James. I messed it up, getting everything one place out of sequence and not being able to correct myself in time. Wouldn't have made a difference anyway - he'd scored enough to beat me if I had had the time to correct myself. Five out of eleven, back into third place in the group, all to play for in the final round.
Which was cards against Bat-Erdene, who'd not had a good day and was already out of the running. I stopped the clock on 43 seconds and did manage to recall it correctly, much to my relief. But wait - had Simon messed things up against James? Luckily, not quite. He had gone for a fast time and only got 42 cards right, but that was still just more than James. He was only eight cards away, as Boris and Johannes happily informed me immediately after the match. But no matter! I'd qualified for the second day's competition, just barely, on tie-break, with six wins and six losses!
My opponent in the quarter-final would be the winner of Group C. That was Jonas, who had completely killed his opposition, winning everything except for one late attempt at a super-fast numbers time long after he'd sealed first place in the group and had nothing to lose. Boris had also edged through in second place on tie-break over Andi, but as they say in Germany, a good horse only jumps as high as it has to.
Boris's cousin says that, anyway, on Facebook. I can't promise that everybody in Germany says it.
Ola and Christian qualified from Group B with no real difficulty. Johannes won Group A comfortably, and Mark Anthony prevented a completely European quarter-final lineup by finishing second there.
So the second day started with the first two quarter-finals - me against Jonas, Johannes against Christian. Four Germans and four Miscellaneous in the quarters, but we'd landed in two all-German ties and two all-Misc, so we didn't need to worry about a Teutonic whitewash. The other quarter-finalists were sealed away in a soundproof cupboard so they wouldn't find out what the surprise task was, and we got started.
It turned out to be an interesting challenge - a pack of cards would be split into three piles of seventeen (with the spare card put aside), and beside each pile was a piece of card with a ten-digit number on it. We had to, in this order, look at the first pile of cards, look at the number, recall them on a piece of paper, look at card pile two, look at the second number, recall that, repeat one more time for the third set, and finish. Fastest time wins, but every mistake in recall adds three seconds to your time. Correctly identify the missing card on the final box on the third recall sheet and knock ten seconds off your total time.
I went extremely quickly, more in hope that I could remember such a small amount of information with ease than out of a deliberate strategy. I had a lot of gaps in the cards recall, but I was gratified to see that Jonas was taking much longer, and finished a minute and a half after I did. I just took a guess at the missing card, writing down the three of hearts. First thing that popped into my head.
So then we added up the scores, and yes, I'd won - Jonas, a bit rattled by my speed, had made a fair few mistakes too. I noticed with some amusement that he'd also guessed at the three of hearts. But that made it 1-0 to me! First to four wins it.
From then on we were back to the four disciplines from day one. The loser of the surprise task got to pick which discipline to do next, and after that the choice alternated, with the restriction that you couldn't select either of the disciplines from the previous two matches. Jonas selected names, knowing that it would be an easy win. It was, although my score of 14 wasn't too far behind his 18. Score 1-1.
I chose cards for the next one. I'd woken up feeling a bit more positive about my abilities than when I'd gone to bed, but just to reassure myself further I'd done one practice run of cards, stopping the clock in 24.35 seconds and recalling perfectly. So I knew I could do it. I also knew that Jonas had never done a pack of cards in under 30 seconds. In the quarter-final, I stopped the clock at 28, got it all right, and moved 2-1 ahead.
Jonas chose words. I got a very creditable 37, but he managed 40. 2-2.
Left with a choice of numbers or names in round five, which isn't much of a choice, I went for numbers. I stopped the clock at an extremely fast 19.81 seconds, and had to spend a tense recall period wondering if I'd got the recall all right. It turned out that I had, but it also turned out that Jonas had stopped his own clock at 19.47, so immediately before mine that I hadn't noticed the screen turn blue. And he'd got his recall correct, too. 3-2 to him.
After that, it was a bit of a formality. Naturally he chose names for the next match, and equally naturally, he won. 4-2 and Jonas goes to the semis, but really, I was happy with my performance, I couldn't have done any better - no shame in losing in that way.
Johannes had beaten Christian by an identical score. He not unreasonably pointed out that a surprise task involving lots of picking things up, putting them down and writing is unfair to people with muscular dystrophy or any other kind of physical issues, so perhaps for the future we'll have more exclusively-mental surprises, but it didn't matter in the end.
The other four quarter-finalists were released from captivity and had their own battles. Ola slipped up twice in cards, which should have been his specialist subject, and lost 4-1 to Mark, surprising everyone. Rather less surprising was a flawless 4-0 victory for Simon over Boris. He was just unstoppable. In an interview with a New York Times reporter called Ben (I don't normally remember journalists' names, but this one was quite easy), I predicted that the final would be Simon against Jonas, with Simon to win. I'd been saying that all weekend, and saw no reason to change my predictions now.
(We'll be boarding in ten to fifteen minutes, apparently. I don't think I'm going to finish this marathon blog entry in time. We'll have to say "To Be Continued...", I'm afraid.)
Saturday, April 26, 2014
The XMT is live!
Well, everybody arrived safely for the run-through of how the whole XMT thing will work - and it will work extremely well, by the looks of things! We all need to compliment Nelson and the whole gang on all the preparation, because there's been an immense amount of work gone into this.
As an example of how cool it is, check out the live website! Click on everything, it's a Simon Orton masterpiece of clickability, and the search box on the Matches page can show you, for example, all the matches involving me and cards by typing 'Ben cards', or whatever you want. It'll be live and dynamic during the competition tomorrow!
As an example of how cool it is, check out the live website! Click on everything, it's a Simon Orton masterpiece of clickability, and the search box on the Matches page can show you, for example, all the matches involving me and cards by typing 'Ben cards', or whatever you want. It'll be live and dynamic during the competition tomorrow!
Friday, April 25, 2014
Go Diego Go
I'm here at the scenic Dart Neuroscience building waiting for the competitor registration to start. It really is scenic - mountains and palm trees and things all around, and I saw a hummingbird earlier!
Flew in with James last night, and the two of us had TV interviews and a bit of "psychological testing" from the St Louis university gang this morning, then lunch with Simon, Boris, Johannes and Ola (as well as super-fan Sal). Now we've met up with Teams Phillipines and Mongolia, Gunther is somewhere in the building (or at least his children are over there, being all grown up nowadays, depressingly enough), Jonas and Christian should shortly be arriving from their trans-USA road trip, Andi is as mysterious as ever but I'm sure he'll show up...
Ooh, and I've just seen Nelson, I'll go and say hi. More updates later!
Flew in with James last night, and the two of us had TV interviews and a bit of "psychological testing" from the St Louis university gang this morning, then lunch with Simon, Boris, Johannes and Ola (as well as super-fan Sal). Now we've met up with Teams Phillipines and Mongolia, Gunther is somewhere in the building (or at least his children are over there, being all grown up nowadays, depressingly enough), Jonas and Christian should shortly be arriving from their trans-USA road trip, Andi is as mysterious as ever but I'm sure he'll show up...
Ooh, and I've just seen Nelson, I'll go and say hi. More updates later!
Saturday, April 19, 2014
A tingle in the Extremities
We're just a week away from a whole lot of Extremeness in San Diego! I've been annoyingly busy at work and haven't been able to spend nearly enough time spying on my opponents to find out their training scores (people have been keeping things uncharacteristically close to their chests for this one) or planning devious underhand strategies, but I have been practicing downright religiously, doing each discipline once in the morning and once in the evening. Tuesday will bring up exactly 100 of these practice sessions (not counting other practices like devoting a lot of time to the numbers one weekend), and that will be a perfect time to stop and let my brain cool down a bit before the competition itself. I don't really want to do all that much extreme-memorising this weekend, for fear of over-training. Which is a real thing, I'm sure.
As a follow-up to my last post, I did indeed end up in the Group of Death - Bat-Erdene instead of Andi, but he was a close second in that pot. So I'll be relying on a great deal of luck if I want to get through to the second day's fun. Boris does take the view that his group (Jonas, Andi, Annalena and him) is technically more difficult if you look at the rankings, but I'm pretty convinced that mine is the deathiest of them all. Groups can be seen here.
Group A will be an interesting clash between Germany and the Phillipines - Johannes and Gunther will face a very interesting challenge from Mark Anthony and Johann Randall. I think Hannes should coast through, but I wouldn't like to guess who'll take the second place.
Group B is the kids' group - young-looking Ola goes up against Baby-Face Schäfer, Teenage Tearaway Marwin and Little Erwin. I think this will be a very evenly-matched one, with very little to separate the four of them.
Group C I'm thinking will see Jonas and Boris go through to the second day without too much trouble, but who knows? You really can't write off either Andi or Annalena.
And D for Death (Nelson and Simon Orton have both said sorry for it!) leaves me trying to formulate a strategy of rattling Simon somehow and making him make crucial mistakes in the cards and numbers, while simultaneously hoping James gets his words mixed up and trying to summon all my remaining neurons to keep pace with someone significantly less than half my age in a test of speed. It'll be tough...
The really good thing about this competition is that there are only sixteen of us taking part. This makes the whole thing more friendly, lets us all pose for some cool pictures together and allows anyone writing about the tournament to really get a grip on each competitor's individual personality and make the whole XMT sound genuinely groovy!
I should stop calling the tournament "the XMT". The Extreme Memory Tasks are called XMTs, so it's confusing.
Anyway, I think we ought to start thinking about world rankings - assuming that this is the start of a whole wave of new extreme-style competitions around the world, we can't really use the current ranking system for it. And since it's head-to-head, it would make sense to me to do a chess/othello-style thing based on the rating of the person you've won or lost against, maybe combined with a tennis/snooker-style system based on what round you get to before you're knocked out. It just sounds like an opportunity for some complicated maths, and as we all know, there are plenty of memory people who just love things like that.
Some sort of universal formula, maybe involving differential equations and imaginary numbers, to consolidate Extreme, Memoriad, US and WMSC format competitions into one big definitive list? I'm sure it's possible. But how to calculate it so that it says I'm the best, when everyone else is demonstrably much better than me?
As a follow-up to my last post, I did indeed end up in the Group of Death - Bat-Erdene instead of Andi, but he was a close second in that pot. So I'll be relying on a great deal of luck if I want to get through to the second day's fun. Boris does take the view that his group (Jonas, Andi, Annalena and him) is technically more difficult if you look at the rankings, but I'm pretty convinced that mine is the deathiest of them all. Groups can be seen here.
Group A will be an interesting clash between Germany and the Phillipines - Johannes and Gunther will face a very interesting challenge from Mark Anthony and Johann Randall. I think Hannes should coast through, but I wouldn't like to guess who'll take the second place.
Group B is the kids' group - young-looking Ola goes up against Baby-Face Schäfer, Teenage Tearaway Marwin and Little Erwin. I think this will be a very evenly-matched one, with very little to separate the four of them.
Group C I'm thinking will see Jonas and Boris go through to the second day without too much trouble, but who knows? You really can't write off either Andi or Annalena.
And D for Death (Nelson and Simon Orton have both said sorry for it!) leaves me trying to formulate a strategy of rattling Simon somehow and making him make crucial mistakes in the cards and numbers, while simultaneously hoping James gets his words mixed up and trying to summon all my remaining neurons to keep pace with someone significantly less than half my age in a test of speed. It'll be tough...
The really good thing about this competition is that there are only sixteen of us taking part. This makes the whole thing more friendly, lets us all pose for some cool pictures together and allows anyone writing about the tournament to really get a grip on each competitor's individual personality and make the whole XMT sound genuinely groovy!
I should stop calling the tournament "the XMT". The Extreme Memory Tasks are called XMTs, so it's confusing.
Anyway, I think we ought to start thinking about world rankings - assuming that this is the start of a whole wave of new extreme-style competitions around the world, we can't really use the current ranking system for it. And since it's head-to-head, it would make sense to me to do a chess/othello-style thing based on the rating of the person you've won or lost against, maybe combined with a tennis/snooker-style system based on what round you get to before you're knocked out. It just sounds like an opportunity for some complicated maths, and as we all know, there are plenty of memory people who just love things like that.
Some sort of universal formula, maybe involving differential equations and imaginary numbers, to consolidate Extreme, Memoriad, US and WMSC format competitions into one big definitive list? I'm sure it's possible. But how to calculate it so that it says I'm the best, when everyone else is demonstrably much better than me?
Sunday, April 13, 2014
They are the X-Mem!
Interviews with the top favourites for the Extreme Memory Tournament (and also with me) can be seen on that link. But the main reason to tune into that website is for the draw for the group stages, this Tuesday, at 5pm British time (midday EST)!
Here's how it works - we're in four groups of four, and each one in a group has one head-to-head match against each of the others for each of the four disciplines (names, numbers, cards, words), making twelve matches in total for everyone. There'll be one from each seedings pot in each group, so they'll be arranged like this:
Pot 1: Johannes Mallow, Simon Reinhard, Jonas von Essen, Ola Kåre Risa
Pot 2: Ben Pridmore, Boris Nikolai Konrad, Christian Schäfer, Gunther Karsten
Pot 3: Andi Bell, Bat-Erdene Tsogoo, Marwin Wallonius, Mark Anthony Castaneda
Pot 4: Erwin Balines, Annalena Fischer, Johann Randall Abrina, James Paterson
So, what's a good group for me, and what's a group of death? In terms of the four disciplines, I'm very good at cards, pretty good at numbers, okay at words and bad at names. With words and names counting for half the points, I really need to pick up a couple of wins in those, as well as in my 'specialist subjects', so I'd like to avoid the people who are particularly good at those. I'd also like to avoid the best people at cards and numbers, because it's easier to make a mistake and get a low score in those two, especially if you're trying hard to beat a close rival.
Okay, so, pot one - obviously you're not going to get an easy opponent there. But here's a thing to consider: there are five people in the world who've done a pack of cards in under thirty seconds in competition, and one of them is me, one is the sadly-missed Wang Feng, and the other three are Johannes, Simon and Ola. Jonas is the one of that group who I'd feel most confident at beating at the cards. Am I really hoping I get drawn against the world champion? Well, maybe I am - I can say from experience that motivation tends to be at a low ebb the year immediately after a WMC win, after all. Johannes is the best in the world at 5-minute numbers and will probably be the best at 1-minute numbers as well. Simon isn't far behind him there and is the world's best at speed cards. The two of them are also very hot at names and words, more so than the others. So, weird though it sounds, my hope is to end up in a group with Jonas, or else with Ola.
Pot three - we go from one extreme to another here, no pun intended, with the man who's been in memory competitions almost since the start in Andi, and the youth who was barely even alive when Andi won his first world championship, Bat-Erdene. I tend to assume that young people are better at fast, computer-based challenges than old people (and, strangely, I still consider myself to be a young person when I'm making that kind of comparison), so I'd prefer to have the old man in my group than the young boy. But Andi was always very good with speed cards in the old days, he was always very good at names back when the world championship rules were the sensible kind that we have in the XMT, rather than the silly kind they're using now, and he's probably still the most dangerous all-rounder in this pot, elderly though he is. I'm crossing my fingers for Mark Anthony here, just because he doesn't have the long experience of Andi or the youthful energy of Bat-Erdene and Marwin, and because he's tended to shine in just one or two disciplines in the big competitions, and been less exceptional than the others elsewhere - he's the only one of these four not to beat the 40-second barrier in speed cards.
Pot four - got to avoid James here. He's in that pot because he's not so hot at cards and numbers, but he's fearsome at names and words, and I wouldn't give myself any chance of a win in those two disciplines against him. When it comes to cards, Johann is the one to avoid, and Erwin too - they're maybe not quite as fast as the top competitors, but they're getting closer. If I'm to have any chance of getting to the coveted second day of competition, I really want to collect maximum points against the lowest-ranked in the group, and I think my best hopes of that are against Annalena.
So, in summary, best group - Jonas, me, Mark Anthony, Annalena.
Group of death - Simon, me, Andi, James.
Or am I entirely wrong in my estimation of my opponents? Very probably.
Here's how it works - we're in four groups of four, and each one in a group has one head-to-head match against each of the others for each of the four disciplines (names, numbers, cards, words), making twelve matches in total for everyone. There'll be one from each seedings pot in each group, so they'll be arranged like this:
Pot 1: Johannes Mallow, Simon Reinhard, Jonas von Essen, Ola Kåre Risa
Pot 2: Ben Pridmore, Boris Nikolai Konrad, Christian Schäfer, Gunther Karsten
Pot 3: Andi Bell, Bat-Erdene Tsogoo, Marwin Wallonius, Mark Anthony Castaneda
Pot 4: Erwin Balines, Annalena Fischer, Johann Randall Abrina, James Paterson
So, what's a good group for me, and what's a group of death? In terms of the four disciplines, I'm very good at cards, pretty good at numbers, okay at words and bad at names. With words and names counting for half the points, I really need to pick up a couple of wins in those, as well as in my 'specialist subjects', so I'd like to avoid the people who are particularly good at those. I'd also like to avoid the best people at cards and numbers, because it's easier to make a mistake and get a low score in those two, especially if you're trying hard to beat a close rival.
Okay, so, pot one - obviously you're not going to get an easy opponent there. But here's a thing to consider: there are five people in the world who've done a pack of cards in under thirty seconds in competition, and one of them is me, one is the sadly-missed Wang Feng, and the other three are Johannes, Simon and Ola. Jonas is the one of that group who I'd feel most confident at beating at the cards. Am I really hoping I get drawn against the world champion? Well, maybe I am - I can say from experience that motivation tends to be at a low ebb the year immediately after a WMC win, after all. Johannes is the best in the world at 5-minute numbers and will probably be the best at 1-minute numbers as well. Simon isn't far behind him there and is the world's best at speed cards. The two of them are also very hot at names and words, more so than the others. So, weird though it sounds, my hope is to end up in a group with Jonas, or else with Ola.
Pot three - we go from one extreme to another here, no pun intended, with the man who's been in memory competitions almost since the start in Andi, and the youth who was barely even alive when Andi won his first world championship, Bat-Erdene. I tend to assume that young people are better at fast, computer-based challenges than old people (and, strangely, I still consider myself to be a young person when I'm making that kind of comparison), so I'd prefer to have the old man in my group than the young boy. But Andi was always very good with speed cards in the old days, he was always very good at names back when the world championship rules were the sensible kind that we have in the XMT, rather than the silly kind they're using now, and he's probably still the most dangerous all-rounder in this pot, elderly though he is. I'm crossing my fingers for Mark Anthony here, just because he doesn't have the long experience of Andi or the youthful energy of Bat-Erdene and Marwin, and because he's tended to shine in just one or two disciplines in the big competitions, and been less exceptional than the others elsewhere - he's the only one of these four not to beat the 40-second barrier in speed cards.
Pot four - got to avoid James here. He's in that pot because he's not so hot at cards and numbers, but he's fearsome at names and words, and I wouldn't give myself any chance of a win in those two disciplines against him. When it comes to cards, Johann is the one to avoid, and Erwin too - they're maybe not quite as fast as the top competitors, but they're getting closer. If I'm to have any chance of getting to the coveted second day of competition, I really want to collect maximum points against the lowest-ranked in the group, and I think my best hopes of that are against Annalena.
So, in summary, best group - Jonas, me, Mark Anthony, Annalena.
Group of death - Simon, me, Andi, James.
Or am I entirely wrong in my estimation of my opponents? Very probably.
Sunday, March 30, 2014
Memorisin' all over the world
Yesterday it was the Welsh Memory Championship in the scenic surroundings of Llanover. I got a lift there and back courtesy of Darren and Claire Ferguson, and we had a great turnout of the cream of English, Welsh and Danish memorisers. Simultaneously (except for the four-hour time difference), the US Memory Championship was happening in New York - Nelson won that one, which is awesome.
Back in Wales, Dai put on another fantastic competition - it was a close-fought thing for the Welsh title between John Burrows and James Paterson, but John came through in the end with a few new national records along the way. Not having done any training for this kind of event (it's all been Extreme for the last month), I was quite a long way from my best, but I managed a 35-second pack of cards at the end to beat off the challenge of the increasingly great Marlo Knight. His brother Cole made his debut too - we really need more sibling rivalries in memory sports, and we welcomed another newcomer Dan Evans and not-newcomers-any-more Phill Ash and Jake O'Gorman, as well as the international contingent Søren Damtoft. Am I forgetting anyone? I bet I am, I always do.
We also had a team of arbiters led by the irreplaceable Phil Chambers, so the whole competition went super-smoothly, even though the village hall was double-booked with an army of singing children. That's the kind of thing that tends to get in the way of a memory competition, but it really didn't. And we all filled in a questionnaire from a psychology PhD student, so she'll no doubt come to some disturbing conclusions about memory people in general and publish them for the world to see.
But I return to Belper loaded with cool gifts from Dai, including a totally awesome shiny gold clock with elephants on it, which is hanging precariously on my wall (blu-tack probably isn't going to work, but you never know). I've been wanting to get a clock for the living room for ages.
Back in Wales, Dai put on another fantastic competition - it was a close-fought thing for the Welsh title between John Burrows and James Paterson, but John came through in the end with a few new national records along the way. Not having done any training for this kind of event (it's all been Extreme for the last month), I was quite a long way from my best, but I managed a 35-second pack of cards at the end to beat off the challenge of the increasingly great Marlo Knight. His brother Cole made his debut too - we really need more sibling rivalries in memory sports, and we welcomed another newcomer Dan Evans and not-newcomers-any-more Phill Ash and Jake O'Gorman, as well as the international contingent Søren Damtoft. Am I forgetting anyone? I bet I am, I always do.
We also had a team of arbiters led by the irreplaceable Phil Chambers, so the whole competition went super-smoothly, even though the village hall was double-booked with an army of singing children. That's the kind of thing that tends to get in the way of a memory competition, but it really didn't. And we all filled in a questionnaire from a psychology PhD student, so she'll no doubt come to some disturbing conclusions about memory people in general and publish them for the world to see.
But I return to Belper loaded with cool gifts from Dai, including a totally awesome shiny gold clock with elephants on it, which is hanging precariously on my wall (blu-tack probably isn't going to work, but you never know). I've been wanting to get a clock for the living room for ages.
Sunday, March 09, 2014
Let's get Extreme!
I have been practicing for the Extreme Memory Tournament for the last week, morning and evening. Except yesterday, when I had a hangover. But I've still had fourteen trial runs of each of the four disciplines since I started this regime - they're Extreme because they're fast. But let me catch you all up with what I'm talking about, if you haven't been following the Extreme latest.
All details are on this website
The Extreme Memory Tournament (XMT) is new type of memory competition. The tournament leaves the traditional style of memory competition by breaking down every event into short, exciting, head-to-head memory battles. The XMT is an attempt to crown the best memory in the world by challenging competitors with various intense memory tasks.
Extreme. And entertainingly different from the competitions we've had before! I really am looking forward to it!
The Basics
•The Competition will be...◦two-day event held on April 26th and 27th, 2014
◦
held at the Dart Neuroscience Convention Center in San Diego, CA
◦
sponsored by Dart Neuroscience and Washington University in St. Louis (WUSL)
◦
offering money prizes from a pool of $60,000
•
16 of the top mental athletes in the world will be competing to ensure that the competition is at the highest level.
•
The competitors will be split up into 4 groups of 4, mixing the best and worst in each group to maintain fairness.
•
The competition will be run first in group stages (Day 1) and then single-elimination Quarterfinals, Semifinals, Runner-up Match, and Finals (Day 2).
•
All matches will be head-to-head competitive style, with competitors facing each other (1-on-1).
•
All events will be digital. All memorization/recall will occur on a laptop. For XMTs, a laptop may or may not be used (this will be announced prior to the task).
I forget whether I've mentioned it before, but I'm down to number 6 in the world rankings now, meaning number 5 in the list of seeds for this tournament (Wang Feng isn't coming, although he is doing a Chinese TV show with Boris next week), meaning I'll be in a group with one of the top four. Unless I improve my ranking at the Welsh competition at the end of the month, but I can tell you now that that's not going to happen. The people in the third and fourth seeding pots are also the kind of people who'll beat me at this, too, so I suppose it doesn't matter whether I'm in the first or second.
Good things about this - computers! I mean, it is the twenty-first century. And the software being designed by Simon Orton, who always knows what he's doing, and tested extensively by him and Nelson Dellis, who likewise knows his onions, before it's released to the competitors to practice with, and before it's used in the competition. Not to name names, but there are some other competitions where it might have been a good idea to test whether technology works or not before using it.
Day 1 - Group Stage
•There will be 4 events throughout the Group Stage matches:◦
1-Minute Names
◦1-Minute Numbers
◦1-Minute Cards
◦1-Minute Words
•
3 minute recall time for all events.
•
Overall percentage memorized correctly will be calculated after each event and used in the case of a tie-break.
•
Each competitor will face all others in his/her respective group, for each of these memory tasks. 6 different matches, with 4 events each = 24 different head-to-head battles per group. 96 total matches on Day 1.
•
Points will be earned if a match is won (3 points) or tied (1 point). No points for a loss.
•
The top two leaders in each group (by points, or by tie-break percentage if necessary) will advance to Day 2.
•
All 4 memory tasks against an opponent will be split up over the course of the day to keep things moving, light, and interesting. That way, the point accumulation can be a close race till the very end.
Actually, what's interesting here is that three points for a win is a very football kind of thing. You wouldn't have thought a competition organised by Americans would have done that, would you? There'll be two head-to-heads happening at the same time (the two in the same group going simultaneously), so there'll be the opportunity to watch everyone else. It should be a much more fun spectator sport than most memory competitions!
Day 2 - Single Elimination Stage
•
All matches will be head-to-head, with the competitors facing each other (1-on-1 style).
•
Each match will be a best-of-7 series (first to 4 wins).
•In addition to the 4 events listed above, there will also be:◦
XMTs (Extreme Memory Tasks)
•
All 4 Quarterfinal matches will begin at the same time so that XMT #1 is revealed and executed at the same time. *All QF matches will execute the same XMT.*
•
Both Semifinals matches will begin at the same time so that XMT #2 is revealed an executed at the same time. *All SF matches will execute the same XMT.*
•
The first match of each match will always start with an XMT. This will decide who gets the first point. The loser of the XMT gets to choose the next event. From there on forward, choice of the next event is given to alternating competitors. The same discipline cannot be chosen twice in a row.
•
Same rules apply for the 4 disciplines as in Day 1, only with some additional tiebreak rules, which are outlined on the event pages.
•There will be an additional Third-place Match between the losers from the SF round. This match will decide the 3rd and 4th place positions.
•The Finals will be a best-of-9 series (first to 5 points) to make it as interesting as possible.◦
There will be 2 XMTs in this event.
◦
XMT #3 will be to used to decide the first point and will be the same task as the one used for the Third-place Match.
◦
XMT #4 will be used to decide who the 4th (total) point. (i.e. when the score is 3-0 or 2-1)
Yes, I'm curious about the XMTs. We'll be told what they are ten minutes before we do them, apparently. No clues.
I need to clarify whether "The same discipline cannot be chosen twice in a row" means that you can't choose the one your opponent just chose, or that you can't choose the one you chose two events ago, or both. Probably both, but remind me to ask Nelson about that.
Names
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
The Basics
•1 minute memorization.
•3 minute recall.
•30 names (first name only) and photos (head-shots).
•+1 point for a completely correct name. No points for an incorrect name.
Details
•Simple international name selection (normal, common names).
•The timer can be stopped if the competitor is finished and confident.◦Once the timer is stopped, that competitor's information vanishes and the other competitor is notified (his screen turns a light shade of blue).
◦The other competitor can continue until the 1 minute is over or until he hits the timer as well.
•The winner is decided by:
1.Better Score (total points)
2.If Equal Score, the Better Time wins.
3.If Equal Score and Equal Time, a draw is given to both competitors.
•TIEBREAK (Day 2 only): A random face will be shown (one that was correctly memorized by both competitors). The first competitor to buzz in with the correct answer, wins (3 seconds to respond orally). Best of 5 (first to answer correctly 3 times).
I've been practicing this (and numbers and words) on Memocamp. If you pay them the reasonable amount of money for a subscription, you get the option of 'free' training where you can specify 1 minute memorisation and 3 minute recall. I got a score of 14 tonight, which I was really quite happy with, but I really think I could do better if I get myself a list of "normal, common names" and work out in advance what that name makes me think of, and develop some kind of working system for associating these things with the facial features of the photo.
I'm still going to be rubbish, of course, but I feel like I could make an effort here.
Numbers
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
The Basics
•1 minute memorization.
•3 minute recall.
•60 digits.
•+1 point for a correct digit. No points for an incorrect digit.
Details
•The timer can be stopped if the competitor is finished and confident.◦Once the timer is stopped, that competitor's information vanishes and the other competitor is notified (his screen turns a light shade of blue).
◦The other competitor can continue until the 1 minute is over or until he hits the timer as well.
•The winner is decided by:
1.Better Score (total points)
2.If Equal Score, the Better Time wins.
3.If Equal Score and Equal Time, a draw is given to both competitors.
•TIEBREAK (Day 2 only): A random position in the 60-digit number will be shown (one that was correctly memorized by both competitors). The first competitor to buzz in with the correct answer, wins (3 seconds to respond orally). Best of 5 (first to answer correctly 3 times).
This is an interesting one. 60 digits is 20 images - six fewer than speed cards. My best time so far is just over twenty seconds, but I'm thinking I can go a bit faster than that. The important thing, though, is to make sure I get them all recalled properly, because there's no point doing a fast time if I only get 57 digits correct and my opponent takes a whole minute to do 60. The thing about numbers is that you don't get the double-check of using each of the 52 possible cards once. But with more practice, hopefully, I can get more consistently reliable if I'm memorising at top speed.
Cards
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
The Basics
•1 minute memorization.
•3 minute recall.
•1 deck.
•+1 point for a correct card. No points for an incorrect card.
Details
•The timer can be stopped if the competitor is finished and confident.
•◦Once the timer is stopped, that competitor's information vanishes and the other competitor is notified (his screen turns a light shade of blue).
◦The other competitor can continue until the 1 minute is over or until he hits the timer as well.
•The winner is decided by:
1.Better Score (total points)
2.If Equal Score, the Better Time wins.
3.If Equal Score and Equal Time, a draw is given to both competitors.
•TIEBREAK (Day 2 only): A random position in the deck will be shown (one that was correctly memorized by both competitors). The first competitor to buzz in with the correct answer, wins (3 seconds to respond orally). Best of 5 (first to answer correctly 3 times).
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Ahh, the old classic. Wouldn't be a memory competition without speed cards. I've been training with this one on the Online Memory Challenge site - being Simon's design, it's probably closer to what we'll get in the tournament, and also the speed cards layout on Memocamp isn't very good (they're too small to see quickly when you look at all of them on the screen at once).
The 3 minute recall is the key here - I understand Nelson's been being asked to increase it, but I hope he holds firm. It's challenging, but still doable.
I won the speed cards at the Memoriad by a surprisingly comfortable margin, but surely someone's going to do a very fast time here - under 20 seconds wouldn't surprise me too much!
Words
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
The Basics
•1 minute memorization.
•3 minute recall.
•50 words (in language of choice).
•Your score is up to your 3rd mistake (to allow slight leniency for misspellings).
Details
•The timer can be stopped if the competitor is finished and confident.
•◦Once the timer is stopped, that competitor's information vanishes and the other competitor is notified (his screen turns a light shade of blue).
◦The other competitor can continue until the 1 minute is over or until he hits the timer as well.
•The winner is decided by:
1.Better Score (total points)
2.If Equal Score, the Better Time wins.
3.If Equal Score and Equal Time, a draw is given to both competitors.
•TIEBREAK (Day 2 only): A random position in the 50-word list will be shown (one that was correctly memorized by both competitors). The first competitor to buzz in with the correct answer, wins (3 seconds to respond orally). Best of 5 (first to answer correctly 3 times).
I don't get why the rules are different for this one. I'll ask that to Nelson, too. It'd make more sense if it was one point per correctly recalled word, same as the others.
My best so far is 31, and that's looking at each word twice. Should I experiment with trying to read all 50 in a minute, really quickly? I don't know if I'll get any kind of reasonable result that way. On the other hand, the words on Memocamp are occasionally weird in English (there's a few that slipped by the translator, I think), so maybe I'll find the tournament easier after training with it. Except that I bet they'll use American spellings...
Overall - can't wait! And I'm determined to keep up the training for the next month-and-a-half!
All details are on this website
The Extreme Memory Tournament (XMT) is new type of memory competition. The tournament leaves the traditional style of memory competition by breaking down every event into short, exciting, head-to-head memory battles. The XMT is an attempt to crown the best memory in the world by challenging competitors with various intense memory tasks.
Extreme. And entertainingly different from the competitions we've had before! I really am looking forward to it!
The Basics
•The Competition will be...◦two-day event held on April 26th and 27th, 2014
◦
held at the Dart Neuroscience Convention Center in San Diego, CA
◦
sponsored by Dart Neuroscience and Washington University in St. Louis (WUSL)
◦
offering money prizes from a pool of $60,000
•
16 of the top mental athletes in the world will be competing to ensure that the competition is at the highest level.
•
The competitors will be split up into 4 groups of 4, mixing the best and worst in each group to maintain fairness.
•
The competition will be run first in group stages (Day 1) and then single-elimination Quarterfinals, Semifinals, Runner-up Match, and Finals (Day 2).
•
All matches will be head-to-head competitive style, with competitors facing each other (1-on-1).
•
All events will be digital. All memorization/recall will occur on a laptop. For XMTs, a laptop may or may not be used (this will be announced prior to the task).
I forget whether I've mentioned it before, but I'm down to number 6 in the world rankings now, meaning number 5 in the list of seeds for this tournament (Wang Feng isn't coming, although he is doing a Chinese TV show with Boris next week), meaning I'll be in a group with one of the top four. Unless I improve my ranking at the Welsh competition at the end of the month, but I can tell you now that that's not going to happen. The people in the third and fourth seeding pots are also the kind of people who'll beat me at this, too, so I suppose it doesn't matter whether I'm in the first or second.
Good things about this - computers! I mean, it is the twenty-first century. And the software being designed by Simon Orton, who always knows what he's doing, and tested extensively by him and Nelson Dellis, who likewise knows his onions, before it's released to the competitors to practice with, and before it's used in the competition. Not to name names, but there are some other competitions where it might have been a good idea to test whether technology works or not before using it.
Day 1 - Group Stage
•There will be 4 events throughout the Group Stage matches:◦
1-Minute Names
◦1-Minute Numbers
◦1-Minute Cards
◦1-Minute Words
•
3 minute recall time for all events.
•
Overall percentage memorized correctly will be calculated after each event and used in the case of a tie-break.
•
Each competitor will face all others in his/her respective group, for each of these memory tasks. 6 different matches, with 4 events each = 24 different head-to-head battles per group. 96 total matches on Day 1.
•
Points will be earned if a match is won (3 points) or tied (1 point). No points for a loss.
•
The top two leaders in each group (by points, or by tie-break percentage if necessary) will advance to Day 2.
•
All 4 memory tasks against an opponent will be split up over the course of the day to keep things moving, light, and interesting. That way, the point accumulation can be a close race till the very end.
Actually, what's interesting here is that three points for a win is a very football kind of thing. You wouldn't have thought a competition organised by Americans would have done that, would you? There'll be two head-to-heads happening at the same time (the two in the same group going simultaneously), so there'll be the opportunity to watch everyone else. It should be a much more fun spectator sport than most memory competitions!
Day 2 - Single Elimination Stage
•
All matches will be head-to-head, with the competitors facing each other (1-on-1 style).
•
Each match will be a best-of-7 series (first to 4 wins).
•In addition to the 4 events listed above, there will also be:◦
XMTs (Extreme Memory Tasks)
•
All 4 Quarterfinal matches will begin at the same time so that XMT #1 is revealed and executed at the same time. *All QF matches will execute the same XMT.*
•
Both Semifinals matches will begin at the same time so that XMT #2 is revealed an executed at the same time. *All SF matches will execute the same XMT.*
•
The first match of each match will always start with an XMT. This will decide who gets the first point. The loser of the XMT gets to choose the next event. From there on forward, choice of the next event is given to alternating competitors. The same discipline cannot be chosen twice in a row.
•
Same rules apply for the 4 disciplines as in Day 1, only with some additional tiebreak rules, which are outlined on the event pages.
•There will be an additional Third-place Match between the losers from the SF round. This match will decide the 3rd and 4th place positions.
•The Finals will be a best-of-9 series (first to 5 points) to make it as interesting as possible.◦
There will be 2 XMTs in this event.
◦
XMT #3 will be to used to decide the first point and will be the same task as the one used for the Third-place Match.
◦
XMT #4 will be used to decide who the 4th (total) point. (i.e. when the score is 3-0 or 2-1)
Yes, I'm curious about the XMTs. We'll be told what they are ten minutes before we do them, apparently. No clues.
I need to clarify whether "The same discipline cannot be chosen twice in a row" means that you can't choose the one your opponent just chose, or that you can't choose the one you chose two events ago, or both. Probably both, but remind me to ask Nelson about that.
Names
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
The Basics
•1 minute memorization.
•3 minute recall.
•30 names (first name only) and photos (head-shots).
•+1 point for a completely correct name. No points for an incorrect name.
Details
•Simple international name selection (normal, common names).
•The timer can be stopped if the competitor is finished and confident.◦Once the timer is stopped, that competitor's information vanishes and the other competitor is notified (his screen turns a light shade of blue).
◦The other competitor can continue until the 1 minute is over or until he hits the timer as well.
•The winner is decided by:
1.Better Score (total points)
2.If Equal Score, the Better Time wins.
3.If Equal Score and Equal Time, a draw is given to both competitors.
•TIEBREAK (Day 2 only): A random face will be shown (one that was correctly memorized by both competitors). The first competitor to buzz in with the correct answer, wins (3 seconds to respond orally). Best of 5 (first to answer correctly 3 times).
I've been practicing this (and numbers and words) on Memocamp. If you pay them the reasonable amount of money for a subscription, you get the option of 'free' training where you can specify 1 minute memorisation and 3 minute recall. I got a score of 14 tonight, which I was really quite happy with, but I really think I could do better if I get myself a list of "normal, common names" and work out in advance what that name makes me think of, and develop some kind of working system for associating these things with the facial features of the photo.
I'm still going to be rubbish, of course, but I feel like I could make an effort here.
Numbers
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
The Basics
•1 minute memorization.
•3 minute recall.
•60 digits.
•+1 point for a correct digit. No points for an incorrect digit.
Details
•The timer can be stopped if the competitor is finished and confident.◦Once the timer is stopped, that competitor's information vanishes and the other competitor is notified (his screen turns a light shade of blue).
◦The other competitor can continue until the 1 minute is over or until he hits the timer as well.
•The winner is decided by:
1.Better Score (total points)
2.If Equal Score, the Better Time wins.
3.If Equal Score and Equal Time, a draw is given to both competitors.
•TIEBREAK (Day 2 only): A random position in the 60-digit number will be shown (one that was correctly memorized by both competitors). The first competitor to buzz in with the correct answer, wins (3 seconds to respond orally). Best of 5 (first to answer correctly 3 times).
This is an interesting one. 60 digits is 20 images - six fewer than speed cards. My best time so far is just over twenty seconds, but I'm thinking I can go a bit faster than that. The important thing, though, is to make sure I get them all recalled properly, because there's no point doing a fast time if I only get 57 digits correct and my opponent takes a whole minute to do 60. The thing about numbers is that you don't get the double-check of using each of the 52 possible cards once. But with more practice, hopefully, I can get more consistently reliable if I'm memorising at top speed.
Cards
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
The Basics
•1 minute memorization.
•3 minute recall.
•1 deck.
•+1 point for a correct card. No points for an incorrect card.
Details
•The timer can be stopped if the competitor is finished and confident.
•◦Once the timer is stopped, that competitor's information vanishes and the other competitor is notified (his screen turns a light shade of blue).
◦The other competitor can continue until the 1 minute is over or until he hits the timer as well.
•The winner is decided by:
1.Better Score (total points)
2.If Equal Score, the Better Time wins.
3.If Equal Score and Equal Time, a draw is given to both competitors.
•TIEBREAK (Day 2 only): A random position in the deck will be shown (one that was correctly memorized by both competitors). The first competitor to buzz in with the correct answer, wins (3 seconds to respond orally). Best of 5 (first to answer correctly 3 times).
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Ahh, the old classic. Wouldn't be a memory competition without speed cards. I've been training with this one on the Online Memory Challenge site - being Simon's design, it's probably closer to what we'll get in the tournament, and also the speed cards layout on Memocamp isn't very good (they're too small to see quickly when you look at all of them on the screen at once).
The 3 minute recall is the key here - I understand Nelson's been being asked to increase it, but I hope he holds firm. It's challenging, but still doable.
I won the speed cards at the Memoriad by a surprisingly comfortable margin, but surely someone's going to do a very fast time here - under 20 seconds wouldn't surprise me too much!
Words
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
The Basics
•1 minute memorization.
•3 minute recall.
•50 words (in language of choice).
•Your score is up to your 3rd mistake (to allow slight leniency for misspellings).
Details
•The timer can be stopped if the competitor is finished and confident.
•◦Once the timer is stopped, that competitor's information vanishes and the other competitor is notified (his screen turns a light shade of blue).
◦The other competitor can continue until the 1 minute is over or until he hits the timer as well.
•The winner is decided by:
1.Better Score (total points)
2.If Equal Score, the Better Time wins.
3.If Equal Score and Equal Time, a draw is given to both competitors.
•TIEBREAK (Day 2 only): A random position in the 50-word list will be shown (one that was correctly memorized by both competitors). The first competitor to buzz in with the correct answer, wins (3 seconds to respond orally). Best of 5 (first to answer correctly 3 times).
I don't get why the rules are different for this one. I'll ask that to Nelson, too. It'd make more sense if it was one point per correctly recalled word, same as the others.
My best so far is 31, and that's looking at each word twice. Should I experiment with trying to read all 50 in a minute, really quickly? I don't know if I'll get any kind of reasonable result that way. On the other hand, the words on Memocamp are occasionally weird in English (there's a few that slipped by the translator, I think), so maybe I'll find the tournament easier after training with it. Except that I bet they'll use American spellings...
Overall - can't wait! And I'm determined to keep up the training for the next month-and-a-half!
Sunday, March 02, 2014
It's the EGP!
It seems like ages since I went to an othello tournament. And incidentally, Blogger, stop auto-capitalising "othello", please - I've always spelt it with a lower-case o, and I don't intend to stop now, whether or not the general consensus is a capital letter even for the board game. Not that Blogger knows I'm talking about the board game, the stupid thing, it thinks I'm talking about Shakespeare, I bet.
Where was I? Oh yes, Cambridge. I was in Cambridge this weekend, for the British leg of the European Grand Prix, also known as the Cambridge International. Lots of capital letters there, and I bet Blogger wouldn't auto-correct half of them if I'd forgotten them. We were in the luxurious surroundings of the Old Combination Room at Trinity College - I have no idea why it's called that, but it's dominated by enormous life-sized full-body portraits of illustrious people and basically looks like the kind of room that you'd find in Buckingham Palace if they held Othello tournaments there. The college porters, that army of bowler-hatted men who wander around the university doing unfathomable portery things, call it "the OCR".
We had 27 competitors from all around Europe - 9 British, 6 Dutch, 4 French, 2 Belgian, one each from Germany, Greece, Italy and Norway, and an American and Malaysian who live in Europe and came along to make it super-international. I'm so out of practice that I did really terribly, but that was only to be expected. It's just fun to be in the surroundings of an Othello competition - the click-clack of flipping discs, the buzz of conversation about games that have just finished, the sssssssh from someone who's still playing their game and wants the conversation to shut up so they can concentrate, the very-slightly-quieter-for-a-split-second conversation continuing unabated...
Highlights for me included a chance to apply my Golden Rule of othello (see, it doesn't get a capital letter even now) - always play a Stoner trap if it's possible, whether or not it looks like it might be a good idea. This all comes from a time when I decided not to play one and it turned out to be a good idea after all. And this time, it worked! Also, I won a really quite exciting game against Benkt, 33-31 that made up for losing quite a lot of other games in horrible ways.
I ended up with 5 points from 11 rounds, including one for a bye, and finished 20th out of 27 - which is obviously worse than the half-way point I normally aim for, but I don't really mind. The excitement came at the top end of the leaderboard - Imre was all-conquering on the first day but was caught up on the second by the European contingent; the final ended up between him and Nicky van den Biggelaar, who won 33-31 in the final game!
It's good to be back in the othelloing swing of things, although from now until the end of April I'm going to try to devote myself to memory. And not just normal memory, EXTREME memory! I'll blog about it at length tomorrow, if only to keep myself properly motivated.
Where was I? Oh yes, Cambridge. I was in Cambridge this weekend, for the British leg of the European Grand Prix, also known as the Cambridge International. Lots of capital letters there, and I bet Blogger wouldn't auto-correct half of them if I'd forgotten them. We were in the luxurious surroundings of the Old Combination Room at Trinity College - I have no idea why it's called that, but it's dominated by enormous life-sized full-body portraits of illustrious people and basically looks like the kind of room that you'd find in Buckingham Palace if they held Othello tournaments there. The college porters, that army of bowler-hatted men who wander around the university doing unfathomable portery things, call it "the OCR".
We had 27 competitors from all around Europe - 9 British, 6 Dutch, 4 French, 2 Belgian, one each from Germany, Greece, Italy and Norway, and an American and Malaysian who live in Europe and came along to make it super-international. I'm so out of practice that I did really terribly, but that was only to be expected. It's just fun to be in the surroundings of an Othello competition - the click-clack of flipping discs, the buzz of conversation about games that have just finished, the sssssssh from someone who's still playing their game and wants the conversation to shut up so they can concentrate, the very-slightly-quieter-for-a-split-second conversation continuing unabated...
Highlights for me included a chance to apply my Golden Rule of othello (see, it doesn't get a capital letter even now) - always play a Stoner trap if it's possible, whether or not it looks like it might be a good idea. This all comes from a time when I decided not to play one and it turned out to be a good idea after all. And this time, it worked! Also, I won a really quite exciting game against Benkt, 33-31 that made up for losing quite a lot of other games in horrible ways.
I ended up with 5 points from 11 rounds, including one for a bye, and finished 20th out of 27 - which is obviously worse than the half-way point I normally aim for, but I don't really mind. The excitement came at the top end of the leaderboard - Imre was all-conquering on the first day but was caught up on the second by the European contingent; the final ended up between him and Nicky van den Biggelaar, who won 33-31 in the final game!
It's good to be back in the othelloing swing of things, although from now until the end of April I'm going to try to devote myself to memory. And not just normal memory, EXTREME memory! I'll blog about it at length tomorrow, if only to keep myself properly motivated.
Monday, February 24, 2014
This is awesome! This is awesome!
Perhaps there are better things you can do with your time than watching six men pretending (very convincingly) to beat each other up, but that still didn't stop the long-awaited wrestling match between The Shield and The Wyatt Family from being the coolest I've ever seen. Seriously, this is how wrestling should be, and usually isn't. I didn't bother watching the Royal Rumble last month when they made it clear it'd be dominated by old men who used to be cool wrestlers in the past (watching the New Age Outlaws doddering arthritically around the ring isn't really as much fun as their fans insist), and I think I'll skip Wrestlemania for the same reason (Hulk Hogan's coming back, once more), but the fill-a-gap-in-the-schedule pay-per-view (you don't have to pay for it in this country) Elimination Chamber was just great.
Admittedly the main event was dull by comparison to the clash-of-the-bad-guys, and some of the filler stuff was dreadful, but one really good "fight" is enough to satisfy my bloodlust for a couple of months at least - I'll tune in again the next time a thrilling storyline like this one builds up...
Admittedly the main event was dull by comparison to the clash-of-the-bad-guys, and some of the filler stuff was dreadful, but one really good "fight" is enough to satisfy my bloodlust for a couple of months at least - I'll tune in again the next time a thrilling storyline like this one builds up...
Friday, February 14, 2014
What's my age again?
This evening at the Co-op I was at the till behind a teenager insisting she was 35 years old in an optimistic attempt to buy a bottle of booze. It just makes me think, though - not once in my life has anyone asked me for proof of age. I've always looked old and ancient, apparently.
I should get some kind of expert make-up artist to make me look youthful, just so I can be refused alcohol or cigarettes in a shop. It'd be a great experience. I'm sure all I'd need is some trendy young people's clothes and maybe a baseball cap.
I should get some kind of expert make-up artist to make me look youthful, just so I can be refused alcohol or cigarettes in a shop. It'd be a great experience. I'm sure all I'd need is some trendy young people's clothes and maybe a baseball cap.
Monday, February 10, 2014
Illusion is the ultimate weapon
Someone found this blog by googling "mask cartoon vehicles". Which is interesting, because I don't remember ever blogging about the vehicles from the cartoon MASK, much though I actually am interested in the subject. MASK was cool. Not as cool as Transformers or Thundercats, but still pretty cool in its own way.
The most interesting thing about the vehicles was that they came with a driver who had a mask that had special powers, and the way this was phrased on the box was always along the lines of "Dusty Hayes with Backlash mask which pretends to create sonic waves." All the masks "pretended" to do something - the people who played with them didn't pretend, it was the mask itself.
The figures were also available without the vehicles, if you were too poor to afford the cool big toys. Cleverly, the manufacturers made sure that poor children could never be completely satisfied with this purchase, because the masks that came with the sold-separately figures were slightly different from the ones that came with the vehicles; the masks were sort of extended downwards a bit with some extra plastic, making it impossible to take the figures into primary school and tell people you'd got the vehicle at home.
The comic was also quite good (although again, not as good as the Transformers comic... it was probably about as good as the Thundercats comic, which was rubbish compared to the cartoon, but did have the advantage of a Lew Stringer comic strip - rating 30-year-old toy-tie-in comics can be hard work), and most notable for the way it would be filled with characters breaking the fourth wall - villains as well as heroes. There would always be an advert for subscriptions in which evil Miles Mayhem announced to the readers that he was going to buy every copy of MASK from the newsagent to stop you reading about Matt Trakker thwarting his evil plan, and one time the cover had the bad guys fighting over the chew bar that was that issue's free gift. "Stop pushing, Rax! You know I like chews!"
The most interesting thing about the vehicles was that they came with a driver who had a mask that had special powers, and the way this was phrased on the box was always along the lines of "Dusty Hayes with Backlash mask which pretends to create sonic waves." All the masks "pretended" to do something - the people who played with them didn't pretend, it was the mask itself.
The figures were also available without the vehicles, if you were too poor to afford the cool big toys. Cleverly, the manufacturers made sure that poor children could never be completely satisfied with this purchase, because the masks that came with the sold-separately figures were slightly different from the ones that came with the vehicles; the masks were sort of extended downwards a bit with some extra plastic, making it impossible to take the figures into primary school and tell people you'd got the vehicle at home.
The comic was also quite good (although again, not as good as the Transformers comic... it was probably about as good as the Thundercats comic, which was rubbish compared to the cartoon, but did have the advantage of a Lew Stringer comic strip - rating 30-year-old toy-tie-in comics can be hard work), and most notable for the way it would be filled with characters breaking the fourth wall - villains as well as heroes. There would always be an advert for subscriptions in which evil Miles Mayhem announced to the readers that he was going to buy every copy of MASK from the newsagent to stop you reading about Matt Trakker thwarting his evil plan, and one time the cover had the bad guys fighting over the chew bar that was that issue's free gift. "Stop pushing, Rax! You know I like chews!"
Sunday, February 09, 2014
Constituent
It occurred to me that I should find out what parliamentary constituency I'm in now, and it turns out it's Mid-Derbyshire. Which is a brand new thing dreamed up for the last elections. And a funny kind of name, too, since it's in the south-east corner of Derbyshire and not in the middle at all. If I was the boundaries commission, I would have called it "That Bit That's Down Near Derby But Isn't Actually Derby Itself". Also, I would have abolished the whole parliamentary process and made myself some sort of ultimate king of everything (because I'm sure that such is within the powers of the boundaries commission), but first I would have changed the name.
Saturday, February 08, 2014
In good order
Sorry I haven't blogged anything for the last couple of days. Busy at work and, you know, sleeping and things. But I've now got a phone and internet in my new flat (until now I've been latching on to an occasionally dodgy wifi signal), so everything's just peachy. So I thought this would be a good moment to remind everyone that Order of the Stick is still a great webcomic. I haven't blogged on that subject for quite a while, I'm sure.
Here's an example - in the book "Snips, Snails and Dragon Tales", which you can't read on the internet but you can go and buy, the dashing hero Julio Scoundrél has a second-in-command called Fidel Secundus. It took me ages to get that. Now in the online comic (set many years after that story), Julio's sidekick is a woman who talks about the days when her father was doing her job, and her name is Bandana.
This is the kind of gratuitous, clever silliness that makes me a fan of the comic even after all these years - a little joke that's only comprehensible to people who've bought the book and can put two and two together. Go and read it, from the start! All you need is a vague basic knowledge of how games like Dungeons and Dragons work, and you'll be well rewarded.
Here's an example - in the book "Snips, Snails and Dragon Tales", which you can't read on the internet but you can go and buy, the dashing hero Julio Scoundrél has a second-in-command called Fidel Secundus. It took me ages to get that. Now in the online comic (set many years after that story), Julio's sidekick is a woman who talks about the days when her father was doing her job, and her name is Bandana.
This is the kind of gratuitous, clever silliness that makes me a fan of the comic even after all these years - a little joke that's only comprehensible to people who've bought the book and can put two and two together. Go and read it, from the start! All you need is a vague basic knowledge of how games like Dungeons and Dragons work, and you'll be well rewarded.
Tuesday, February 04, 2014
Can I point you in the direction of...
... Demis Hassabis?
The point being, I still get confronted by people who think I'm some kind of super-genius who's not only astonishingly clever and great at everything, but also well able to use this uncanny intellect of mine to amass fame and fortune by the gallon if I only felt like doing it.
So hearing that Demis has just sold his company to Google for £400 million makes me wonder why more people don't go and tell him he's great instead of picking on me. We're roughly the same age (I think he's three months older) and nodding-acquaintances from the glory days of the Mind Sports Olympiad (again, if you think I'm the kind of person who wins everything, you should see Demis), but the key difference is he was actually one of those child prodigies - chess grandmaster at the age of twelve or so, created a famous computer game and made a fortune at the age of sixteen (remember Theme Park? I've never played it, but I've heard good things) and, most impressively of all, is still doing clever things at the age of 37. Which not many child geniuses do, if you think about it.
I don't know what this company of his did, if anything (it was one of those internet startup things, so probably nothing - Google will buy anything), but it goes to show that there really are geniussy types out there, and they're not all fakers like me. Maybe I should give him a call and say hello. I should make an effort to cultivate the friendship of millionaires, you never know when it might come in handy...
The point being, I still get confronted by people who think I'm some kind of super-genius who's not only astonishingly clever and great at everything, but also well able to use this uncanny intellect of mine to amass fame and fortune by the gallon if I only felt like doing it.
So hearing that Demis has just sold his company to Google for £400 million makes me wonder why more people don't go and tell him he's great instead of picking on me. We're roughly the same age (I think he's three months older) and nodding-acquaintances from the glory days of the Mind Sports Olympiad (again, if you think I'm the kind of person who wins everything, you should see Demis), but the key difference is he was actually one of those child prodigies - chess grandmaster at the age of twelve or so, created a famous computer game and made a fortune at the age of sixteen (remember Theme Park? I've never played it, but I've heard good things) and, most impressively of all, is still doing clever things at the age of 37. Which not many child geniuses do, if you think about it.
I don't know what this company of his did, if anything (it was one of those internet startup things, so probably nothing - Google will buy anything), but it goes to show that there really are geniussy types out there, and they're not all fakers like me. Maybe I should give him a call and say hello. I should make an effort to cultivate the friendship of millionaires, you never know when it might come in handy...
Monday, February 03, 2014
The game's not worth the candle
Isn't that a great turn of phrase? Funnily enough, I was reading an old book last night that uses it, and then today I got a Facebook message from a Russian who said the same thing! People can go years, in these modern electrified times, without observing that games aren't worth the candle, so we should celebrate whenever we hear it!
Saturday, February 01, 2014
It's just no fun
All this rain. I mean, it's better than if it had been freezing cold and snowing all winter, but I really can't wait until it's summer again...
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