I've resolved to write something in my blog every morning on the train to work - it's all about getting into a regular schedule, which is also what I need to do with memory training (although that'll be in the evenings at home, not on a train). Anyway, people* have asked how my new job's going, and the answer is, it's great! As a general rule, I don't enjoy my 'real' job, because I see it as something that mainly exists to finance the things I do for fun, but this one is certainly a lot more enjoyable than my previous one - even the hassle of getting there and back isn't as bad as all that...
I also need to keep up with the plan of learning to drive and getting a car, so as to join the hordes of commuters who complain about the traffic every day, rather than about the trains. Driving is hard, you know.
*Well, one person has asked, and I assume that maybe one or two other people I know are vaguely curious
Friday, October 10, 2014
Sunday, September 07, 2014
Witney and Wisdom
Back home from the national othello championship in Witney, near Oxford. Which is a surprisingly big town for somewhere without a train station. And although my beating-everybody streak didn't quite last all day, I did only lose one game out of the nine in total over the weekend, to Guy, and so ended up playing him (he lost his first game, against newcomer/old-timer Richard) in the grand final!
That's the first time I've ever come anywhere near being in the final at the nationals! And although I was severely burnt-out, brainwise, by that point (how I won my last couple of games before that I'm really not sure) and lost miserably, it's still rather cool. I think I'm going to adopt the German style and call myself the Vice-British-Champion for the next year! So three cheers for Guy, not just for winning, but for organising the tournament and for enlisting seven of his relatives to come and play too! The next generation of othello champions - two young Plowmans (Plowmen?) and four young Brands - all had a great time and were a lot of fun. I also made a concerted effort to learn all their names at dinner (Pizza Express) last night (since they were all impressed by my amazing memory skills and I called Mark 'James' at the start of the meal, not helping my genius reputation), and I still remember them now!
That's the first time I've ever come anywhere near being in the final at the nationals! And although I was severely burnt-out, brainwise, by that point (how I won my last couple of games before that I'm really not sure) and lost miserably, it's still rather cool. I think I'm going to adopt the German style and call myself the Vice-British-Champion for the next year! So three cheers for Guy, not just for winning, but for organising the tournament and for enlisting seven of his relatives to come and play too! The next generation of othello champions - two young Plowmans (Plowmen?) and four young Brands - all had a great time and were a lot of fun. I also made a concerted effort to learn all their names at dinner (Pizza Express) last night (since they were all impressed by my amazing memory skills and I called Mark 'James' at the start of the meal, not helping my genius reputation), and I still remember them now!
Saturday, September 06, 2014
Willy, Willy, Harry, Ste...
Apparently all the children in this country know, word for word, a Horrible Histories song listing all the kings and queens of England in order. It's getting harder and harder to be the only person who knows things.
But it must be getting easier to be in the lead in the British Othello Championship after the first day, because that's what I'm doing. With a mixture of veterans and Brand new players (in the form of the Brand family), we've got a strong field of 16 competitors (a really nice number for Adelaide to work out the pairings for each round, especially since nobody was unkind enough to throw a spanner in the works with a drawn game), and I've beaten four of them in a row today. It won't last.
But it must be getting easier to be in the lead in the British Othello Championship after the first day, because that's what I'm doing. With a mixture of veterans and Brand new players (in the form of the Brand family), we've got a strong field of 16 competitors (a really nice number for Adelaide to work out the pairings for each round, especially since nobody was unkind enough to throw a spanner in the works with a drawn game), and I've beaten four of them in a row today. It won't last.
Wednesday, September 03, 2014
It's a living
I've got a new job, up Sheffield way, and it's not only going to pay me actual money for working there (always a plus when it comes to jobs), they're throwing in some extra cash for me to learn to drive and get a car. So I'm going to be a real commuter, and all I need to do is find a driving instructor who's elderly enough not to notice that I'm 37 rather than 17 and so won't jeer at me.
So now I'm currently working out my four weeks' notice at my current job, and then I'll be (eventually, probably) on the road!
So now I'm currently working out my four weeks' notice at my current job, and then I'll be (eventually, probably) on the road!
Wednesday, August 27, 2014
Tuesday, August 26, 2014
MSO Memory
In hopes of getting some people to come to the competition next year, let's talk about the MSO memory competition (or the Memory World Cup, if you want to use its official name). It might need a little refining of the rules before the people who take memory competitions more seriously start showing up - the score calculation was along the lines of "Well, I guess the one who remembers the most stuff is the winner, I haven't really thought about it" - but the idea of everything being scored up to your first mistake, and the very short recall times encourage a different approach to memorising, which is always a good thing!
You have to judge how much you can perfectly remember in the time limit, which is a fascinating balancing-act, much more so than a standard-style event. More World Cups, please! And World Cup competitors!
You have to judge how much you can perfectly remember in the time limit, which is a fascinating balancing-act, much more so than a standard-style event. More World Cups, please! And World Cup competitors!
Monday, August 25, 2014
Back home
And the weather's been miserable all day, too. It's been really nice all week-and-a-bit, more or less, lots of sun and warmth with just the odd shower but not at a time when I was outdoors. I remember the first few years I went to the MSO it was always baking hot that week.
Anyway, on Sunday it was othello, and I won the gold medal against a lot of opponents who either hadn't played for at least a decade or were new to the game. Still, it was fun! That brought my total medal haul up to two gold, one silver and two bronze - funnily enough, at the memory championship I got a (smaller-sized) medal haul of two gold, two silver and two bronze, so I wanted to find a way to get another silver at the MSO. That would have meant being much better at anything that was taking place on the last two days, though, so I just had to stick with my total of five.
A great event, all in all! I'll go back next year! I'm an MSO person again, it's official!
Anyway, on Sunday it was othello, and I won the gold medal against a lot of opponents who either hadn't played for at least a decade or were new to the game. Still, it was fun! That brought my total medal haul up to two gold, one silver and two bronze - funnily enough, at the memory championship I got a (smaller-sized) medal haul of two gold, two silver and two bronze, so I wanted to find a way to get another silver at the MSO. That would have meant being much better at anything that was taking place on the last two days, though, so I just had to stick with my total of five.
A great event, all in all! I'll go back next year! I'm an MSO person again, it's official!
Saturday, August 23, 2014
Memory memory memory
It's the usual dilemma - do I write about the UK Championship before I've got the results to hand, and forget something or get something completely wrong, or do I wait until then and get everyone nagging me about when I'm going to give my rambling bloggy account of the event?
Well, there's no MSO today, so I'll write a bit and maybe fill in the gaps at a later date. The competition took place in the headquarters of TVapex, who did a live streaming of the last bit of the championship (sorry, if I'd known about it earlier I would have mentioned it here) and had a nice venue for us, with a stage at the front, good sound system for Chris's music and the right amount of desks. I did a quick interview with a local radio guy who thought my first name was David and my surname was Pridditch, and so was someone I can hugely sympathise with. Saying hello to the other competitors and trying to remember whether I'd met them before and was supposed to know who they are, I had conversations like "I'm Milan, I talked to you at the World Championship, I was asking you about what brand of cards you use, don't you remember?" Of course, I said. It's nothing personal, it just takes me two meetings at least before I can remember people.
Indeed, meeting up with Yanjaa at the train station to get there involved a bit of guesswork - I saw someone with the kind of hairstyle I was pretty sure she had, standing in the middle of Liverpool Street station and looking like she was waiting for someone, and just sort of walked in front of her, prominently wearing a hat, until she saw me and said hi.
More competitors need to follow the lead of Krzysztof Kuich and wear a T-shirt with their name and nationality prominently written on it. Compulsory name-badges worldwide would make my life so much easier. I may not have the results here, but I did write down everyone's names on a piece of paper, so that I could blog about them without forgetting them entirely or forgetting just how many unnecessary Zs their names contained.
Team England were me, Marlo Knight, Clay Knight, Phill Ash, Jake O'Gorman and Mohammed Afzal Khan. Jake was accompanied by his girlfriend Starr Knight (no relation - I very much approve of everyone at these competitions having the same surname, so hopefully Marlo and Clay will have success in their plans to get their nineteen siblings competing too. That's not an exaggeration, by the way.)
There was a three-man Team Wales - James Paterson (no relation to the writer with two Ts), Daniel Evans (no relation to the tennis player) and Dai Griffiths (returning to competing instead of arbiting for the first time in six years). And a huge international contingent, made up of Yanjaa Altantuya (Sweden), Wessel Sandtke (Netherlands), Javier Moreno (Spain), Søren Damtoft (Denmark), Krzysztof Kuich (Poland), Milan Ondrašovič (Slovakia), Melanie Höllein (Germany), Sebastien Martinez (France) and Ekaterina Matveeva (Russia). Isn't that a great sampling of European memorizers! And I've made a real effort to remember what they all look like, too.
The team of arbiters was small but widely experienced and capable - Nathalie Lecordier, Peter Broomhall and David Sedgwick, under the watchful eye of Phil Chambers and Chris Day. A great gathering, all in all!
As for the competition itself, I was probably more out of practice than I've ever been; I just haven't been able to do any training at all for months. We started with names and faces, which was a pitched battle between James and Yanjaa, then I got a really terrible result in binary which Phil described for the cameras the next day as being astonishingly wonderful, and we followed that up with abstract images, speed numbers and hour numbers, which all followed the same kind of pattern for me.
There was, however, a close contest going on, as we found out when we got the results on day two. James, Yanjaa, Marlo and Milan were all tussling for the top position, setting personal bests, national records and other milestones. And everyone else was happy with their results, too (Søren and Wessel at the head of the chasing pack) - hopefully in my role as the old man with a huge supply of anecdotes about memory competition history, I enhanced their experience as well.
I did rather better on day two - in words I got a low score with lots of little mistakes, but the important thing was that I was memorising a lot more fluently than the day before. 30-minute cards I got 11 packs, attempting 12, which was enough to comfortably beat everyone else even if it's below what I'd normally go for, dates and spoken numbers were okayish, and I just about managed a pack of speed cards, getting 38.11 in the second trial with a recall that took a lot of brain-racking. Milan, though, was the star of the day, getting a time of 29.96! That makes him the seventh person in the under-thirty-seconds club, which really isn't such an exclusive thing any more.
We should get a clubhouse and a secret handshake.
Anyway, that made Milan the winner! By virtue of Marlo and Yanjaa not managing to get a complete pack, I ended up second, pipping James to the post by the narrowest of margins and annoying him immensely, since I did basically the same thing in the crucial speed cards at the XMT. It was a great event! I'm looking forward to the next one already, and maybe I'll manage to do a bit of training and keep up with all these youngsters next time...
Well, there's no MSO today, so I'll write a bit and maybe fill in the gaps at a later date. The competition took place in the headquarters of TVapex, who did a live streaming of the last bit of the championship (sorry, if I'd known about it earlier I would have mentioned it here) and had a nice venue for us, with a stage at the front, good sound system for Chris's music and the right amount of desks. I did a quick interview with a local radio guy who thought my first name was David and my surname was Pridditch, and so was someone I can hugely sympathise with. Saying hello to the other competitors and trying to remember whether I'd met them before and was supposed to know who they are, I had conversations like "I'm Milan, I talked to you at the World Championship, I was asking you about what brand of cards you use, don't you remember?" Of course, I said. It's nothing personal, it just takes me two meetings at least before I can remember people.
Indeed, meeting up with Yanjaa at the train station to get there involved a bit of guesswork - I saw someone with the kind of hairstyle I was pretty sure she had, standing in the middle of Liverpool Street station and looking like she was waiting for someone, and just sort of walked in front of her, prominently wearing a hat, until she saw me and said hi.
More competitors need to follow the lead of Krzysztof Kuich and wear a T-shirt with their name and nationality prominently written on it. Compulsory name-badges worldwide would make my life so much easier. I may not have the results here, but I did write down everyone's names on a piece of paper, so that I could blog about them without forgetting them entirely or forgetting just how many unnecessary Zs their names contained.
Team England were me, Marlo Knight, Clay Knight, Phill Ash, Jake O'Gorman and Mohammed Afzal Khan. Jake was accompanied by his girlfriend Starr Knight (no relation - I very much approve of everyone at these competitions having the same surname, so hopefully Marlo and Clay will have success in their plans to get their nineteen siblings competing too. That's not an exaggeration, by the way.)
There was a three-man Team Wales - James Paterson (no relation to the writer with two Ts), Daniel Evans (no relation to the tennis player) and Dai Griffiths (returning to competing instead of arbiting for the first time in six years). And a huge international contingent, made up of Yanjaa Altantuya (Sweden), Wessel Sandtke (Netherlands), Javier Moreno (Spain), Søren Damtoft (Denmark), Krzysztof Kuich (Poland), Milan Ondrašovič (Slovakia), Melanie Höllein (Germany), Sebastien Martinez (France) and Ekaterina Matveeva (Russia). Isn't that a great sampling of European memorizers! And I've made a real effort to remember what they all look like, too.
The team of arbiters was small but widely experienced and capable - Nathalie Lecordier, Peter Broomhall and David Sedgwick, under the watchful eye of Phil Chambers and Chris Day. A great gathering, all in all!
As for the competition itself, I was probably more out of practice than I've ever been; I just haven't been able to do any training at all for months. We started with names and faces, which was a pitched battle between James and Yanjaa, then I got a really terrible result in binary which Phil described for the cameras the next day as being astonishingly wonderful, and we followed that up with abstract images, speed numbers and hour numbers, which all followed the same kind of pattern for me.
There was, however, a close contest going on, as we found out when we got the results on day two. James, Yanjaa, Marlo and Milan were all tussling for the top position, setting personal bests, national records and other milestones. And everyone else was happy with their results, too (Søren and Wessel at the head of the chasing pack) - hopefully in my role as the old man with a huge supply of anecdotes about memory competition history, I enhanced their experience as well.
I did rather better on day two - in words I got a low score with lots of little mistakes, but the important thing was that I was memorising a lot more fluently than the day before. 30-minute cards I got 11 packs, attempting 12, which was enough to comfortably beat everyone else even if it's below what I'd normally go for, dates and spoken numbers were okayish, and I just about managed a pack of speed cards, getting 38.11 in the second trial with a recall that took a lot of brain-racking. Milan, though, was the star of the day, getting a time of 29.96! That makes him the seventh person in the under-thirty-seconds club, which really isn't such an exclusive thing any more.
We should get a clubhouse and a secret handshake.
Anyway, that made Milan the winner! By virtue of Marlo and Yanjaa not managing to get a complete pack, I ended up second, pipping James to the post by the narrowest of margins and annoying him immensely, since I did basically the same thing in the crucial speed cards at the XMT. It was a great event! I'm looking forward to the next one already, and maybe I'll manage to do a bit of training and keep up with all these youngsters next time...
Thursday, August 21, 2014
Oh, and
I've changed the format of the blog - I got annoyed by not having any "older/newer posts" buttons. It's still the most boring, basic format that has those, so I'm not getting too fancy or artistic...
Fun with numbers
Day one of the UK Memory Championship and I'm too tired to write it up at length - 18 competitors with a really wide range of nationalities (ten or eleven countries, depending on whether Wales and England count as one or two). I did badly, all in all, which is only to be expected with my not having done any training, but it's all to play for tomorrow. Probably.
Wednesday, August 20, 2014
Erratum
(from Monday night) - Saravanan, not Suravanan.
Anyway, I was the first one out of tonight's poker, but it was hardly my fault, someone else just got the outrageous luck that I always rely on. Still, it gives me time to mentally prepare myself for the UK Memory Championship over the next two days! I have to get up early tomorrow to get a train down to Ilford and find the venue - luckily, I'm meeting Jake and Yanjaa along the way, and I'm sure they've got some kind of sense of direction. So the only problem I'll have is the fact that I've done no training at all for months...
Today at the MSO was mental calculations (all the fun of a maths exam! I sometimes wonder why I enjoy this kind of thing so much...) and mastermind, at both of which I ended up somewhere in the middle of the rankings. Aww, I'm half way through my week of mind sports already!
Anyway, I was the first one out of tonight's poker, but it was hardly my fault, someone else just got the outrageous luck that I always rely on. Still, it gives me time to mentally prepare myself for the UK Memory Championship over the next two days! I have to get up early tomorrow to get a train down to Ilford and find the venue - luckily, I'm meeting Jake and Yanjaa along the way, and I'm sure they've got some kind of sense of direction. So the only problem I'll have is the fact that I've done no training at all for months...
Today at the MSO was mental calculations (all the fun of a maths exam! I sometimes wonder why I enjoy this kind of thing so much...) and mastermind, at both of which I ended up somewhere in the middle of the rankings. Aww, I'm half way through my week of mind sports already!
Tuesday, August 19, 2014
Addendum
Switching to poker instead of backgammon was a good plan - I came third! I'm still not a huge fan of lowball, but I suppose it grows on you. So that's one gold, one silver and two bronzes in three days so far, which is a pretty good haul! Still loving the MSO!
Things we learned today
Josef Kollar the ever-present MSO star is friends with Real Musgrave, the creator of pocket dragons. This is a pretty major thing to only find out after seventeen years, isn't it? I'm pretty sure my pocket dragon t-shirts have been to the MSO quite regularly over the years...
Also, I'm not good at oware or quoridor. Possibly I'll drop out of the backgammon tonight and play poker instead. I'm not good at poker either, but losing at poker is more fun than losing at backgammon.
Also, I'm not good at oware or quoridor. Possibly I'll drop out of the backgammon tonight and play poker instead. I'm not good at poker either, but losing at poker is more fun than losing at backgammon.
Monday, August 18, 2014
Mind matters
You know, I vaguely remember that the last couple of times I went to the MSO, I felt like I didn't enjoy it as much as I used to, and maybe it wasn't really my thing any more. I don't know why that was - I've had huge fun there this last couple of days! Games to play, people to meet who I haven't seen for years, ways to stretch my brain into unusual shapes working out strategies on the spur of the moment, it's just brilliant! It's official, I'm an MSO man again.
In continuo this morning, I started off against Matt Cordell, one of the few people who really knows strategy for the game and thinks ahead, instead of just putting the tiles down wherever it looks like they'd score a lot of points, and got completely thrashed, but then I narrowly won one and narrowly lost another (against the game's creator), so all in all that wasn't too bad a showing.
During the day there was an ongoing saga of whether the Memory World Cup was going to happen. Nobody else from the memory world had signed up (shame on you all!), and indeed nobody else from any other world either. But the organisers were very keen for it to happen anyway (rather keener than I was to be in a competition with just myself and maybe someone else making up the numbers), so it did, and I'm very glad it did! We had organiser Etan competing, and newcomer-whose-name-I-should-have-written-down-because-I'm-probably-spelling-it-wrong-now Suravanan, and yes, it was an excellent competition that needs to happen again next year! I'll write about it at length when I get a bit more time.
I also spoke with organiser Tony about maybe holding an XMT tournament in a hotel alongside a bunch of other mind sports next January or March. I'll keep you informed.
Continuo overran, so without more than a few minutes for lunch I went straight into Blokus, which turns out to be an excellent game (it involves placing tetris-ish-shaped tiles on a board so that they touch at the corners, and blocking off your (three) opponents. I won my first ever game, against two experts and one beginner - with a bit of luck, but this kind of thing was exactly what I always loved about the MSO - learning a new game, working out on the fly what would be a good way to play it and maybe occasionally confounding people who know the 'right' way to play and win and weren't expecting me to play the way I did. That only works with brand new games, obviously, and only if I'm lucky - I lost my next two games horribly, but then ended up with the same two experts on the final round and won it, jointly with one of them. So I ended up somewhere in the top half of the final rankings, which goes to show something, but I'm not sure what.
Then it was the memory in the evening, but I seem to have already talked about it, and chronology be damned. I did win, though. So that means in the first two days I've had a bronze, a silver and a gold!
In continuo this morning, I started off against Matt Cordell, one of the few people who really knows strategy for the game and thinks ahead, instead of just putting the tiles down wherever it looks like they'd score a lot of points, and got completely thrashed, but then I narrowly won one and narrowly lost another (against the game's creator), so all in all that wasn't too bad a showing.
During the day there was an ongoing saga of whether the Memory World Cup was going to happen. Nobody else from the memory world had signed up (shame on you all!), and indeed nobody else from any other world either. But the organisers were very keen for it to happen anyway (rather keener than I was to be in a competition with just myself and maybe someone else making up the numbers), so it did, and I'm very glad it did! We had organiser Etan competing, and newcomer-whose-name-I-should-have-written-down-because-I'm-probably-spelling-it-wrong-now Suravanan, and yes, it was an excellent competition that needs to happen again next year! I'll write about it at length when I get a bit more time.
I also spoke with organiser Tony about maybe holding an XMT tournament in a hotel alongside a bunch of other mind sports next January or March. I'll keep you informed.
Continuo overran, so without more than a few minutes for lunch I went straight into Blokus, which turns out to be an excellent game (it involves placing tetris-ish-shaped tiles on a board so that they touch at the corners, and blocking off your (three) opponents. I won my first ever game, against two experts and one beginner - with a bit of luck, but this kind of thing was exactly what I always loved about the MSO - learning a new game, working out on the fly what would be a good way to play it and maybe occasionally confounding people who know the 'right' way to play and win and weren't expecting me to play the way I did. That only works with brand new games, obviously, and only if I'm lucky - I lost my next two games horribly, but then ended up with the same two experts on the final round and won it, jointly with one of them. So I ended up somewhere in the top half of the final rankings, which goes to show something, but I'm not sure what.
Then it was the memory in the evening, but I seem to have already talked about it, and chronology be damned. I did win, though. So that means in the first two days I've had a bronze, a silver and a gold!
Sunday, August 17, 2014
Medaled for England
Granted, it wasn't all that difficult to win medals at the MSO today - we had four players in the Stratego Duel and five in the Classic, and in the latter the bottom three all finished on equal points so it turned into an everyone-gets-a-medal kind of event. But the point is, I was third in the Duel and second in the Classic, so I ended up with two medals and the satisfaction of knowing I didn't come last. And I didn't quite come last in the poker this evening either; I was the second one out.
Now, you might say "So, what you're saying is, you finished second-to-last in everything?", but that's a very glass-half-empty way to look at it. And did YOU win two medals at a prestigious annual mind sports event today? No, I didn't think so.
Now, you might say "So, what you're saying is, you finished second-to-last in everything?", but that's a very glass-half-empty way to look at it. And did YOU win two medals at a prestigious annual mind sports event today? No, I didn't think so.
Monday, July 28, 2014
Hot and friendly!
The ninth Friendly Memory Championship attracted a crowd of people in a very hot room on a very hot day at Attenborough Nature Reserve. I had been worried at one point about not having enough arbiters, what with the ever-present Dai living in Hong Kong, but he's back in Britain and was there to help out, Nick The Greek came to arbit too, and with the ever-awesome Phil, we practically had more arbiters than competitors.
The competitors were the Knight brothers Marlo and Clay (note, he's called Clay and not Cole, as I said in my blog about the Welsh championship. I nearly got it, and we were in a part of the world where they dig coal out of the ground a lot more than clay, I'm sure), other English friends Phill and Jake (a pairing of names that had me singing the Adventure Time tune to myself all day) and Scandinavian Søren and Yanjaa. The latter was new to me, but she's been touring the world of memory competitions lately, and is super-enthusiastic about the whole thing, which is always good to see! I like it when people come to these events with the clear intention of being the world champion. Mongolian-born, Swedish-residing and attributes her American-accented English to Cartoon Network, which I approve of hugely, of course.
We also had Jon from the telly, filming bits and pieces but generally just being there to find out what memory competitions are like and get to know the people - I think we made a good impression, since he came to the pub afterwards as well, and the post-friendly-championship drink is always the best way to get to know us. And we had newcomer Bryan, who couldn't be persuaded to give memorising a go, but I'm sure it's only a matter of time.
The event perhaps didn't go entirely smoothly - the heat in the room killed the overhead projector quite quickly, meaning we couldn't use my trademark Powerpoint slides, and it probably stopped everyone from achieving their best scores. I also had a problem with the spoken numbers - I'd prepared them on Powerpoint as usual, but found they wouldn't play on my new laptop (rather too late, during the competition, I realised that this was because the sound files were stored on the old laptop). No problem, though, I'd just bring my old broken laptop instead. But then it dropped dead the night before the event, so I had to resort to plan C - using one of the online spoken-number generators. But it didn't work quite right, possibly because of a dodgy internet connection, and the other one (plan D) wasn't working at all. So we did Plan E, involving Jake's iPhone (or whatever it was) and the WMC Ladder app.
That worked fine, so we didn't have to go with Plan F, which would have been me reading the numbers out myself. Still, it was the kind of flamingo-up I would have been hugely sarcastic about in my blog if it had been someone else's competition, so I'll just invite you all to make fun of me for being so generally rubbish, please.
Marlo led from start to finish and took home the grand prize (a bottle of good champagne that my boss gave me a while ago - I don't like champagne, so I thought it'd be better appreciated by a specially-selected memory competition winner). Yanjaa was a very strong second, and Søren an excellent third.
The competitors were the Knight brothers Marlo and Clay (note, he's called Clay and not Cole, as I said in my blog about the Welsh championship. I nearly got it, and we were in a part of the world where they dig coal out of the ground a lot more than clay, I'm sure), other English friends Phill and Jake (a pairing of names that had me singing the Adventure Time tune to myself all day) and Scandinavian Søren and Yanjaa. The latter was new to me, but she's been touring the world of memory competitions lately, and is super-enthusiastic about the whole thing, which is always good to see! I like it when people come to these events with the clear intention of being the world champion. Mongolian-born, Swedish-residing and attributes her American-accented English to Cartoon Network, which I approve of hugely, of course.
We also had Jon from the telly, filming bits and pieces but generally just being there to find out what memory competitions are like and get to know the people - I think we made a good impression, since he came to the pub afterwards as well, and the post-friendly-championship drink is always the best way to get to know us. And we had newcomer Bryan, who couldn't be persuaded to give memorising a go, but I'm sure it's only a matter of time.
The event perhaps didn't go entirely smoothly - the heat in the room killed the overhead projector quite quickly, meaning we couldn't use my trademark Powerpoint slides, and it probably stopped everyone from achieving their best scores. I also had a problem with the spoken numbers - I'd prepared them on Powerpoint as usual, but found they wouldn't play on my new laptop (rather too late, during the competition, I realised that this was because the sound files were stored on the old laptop). No problem, though, I'd just bring my old broken laptop instead. But then it dropped dead the night before the event, so I had to resort to plan C - using one of the online spoken-number generators. But it didn't work quite right, possibly because of a dodgy internet connection, and the other one (plan D) wasn't working at all. So we did Plan E, involving Jake's iPhone (or whatever it was) and the WMC Ladder app.
That worked fine, so we didn't have to go with Plan F, which would have been me reading the numbers out myself. Still, it was the kind of flamingo-up I would have been hugely sarcastic about in my blog if it had been someone else's competition, so I'll just invite you all to make fun of me for being so generally rubbish, please.
Marlo led from start to finish and took home the grand prize (a bottle of good champagne that my boss gave me a while ago - I don't like champagne, so I thought it'd be better appreciated by a specially-selected memory competition winner). Yanjaa was a very strong second, and Søren an excellent third.
Monday, July 21, 2014
The Friendly Memory Championship 2014, part 10
And finally! The climax of every memory competition (nearly)
Speed cards is fun to watch and exciting to compete in and makes a great finish to competitions. But what would the scores be like if it was the first of the ten disciplines? Or somewhere in the middle? A lot of the time, the competitors have to get an okay-but-not-spectacular score, to make sure they finish in the position they're aiming for, so there's not always a lot of opportunity to go for that record-breaking fast time.
And speaking of records, when will we see a sub-20-second pack of cards? And on a related note, why was 30 seconds seen as the "four minute mile" of memory competitions for so long? Yes, it's a nice round number, but back in the day, people were really really serious about it as being our Everest.
Long long ago, back in 2006, there was a competition called the Speed Cards Challenge, which consisted of nothing but head-to-head speed cards. It was great, and should happen again. The XMT comes close, obviously, and it'll be interesting to see how the speed cards times go in the future with that - memorising on a computer screen is probably a bit faster than memorising physical cards; it's harder to drop them on the floor, anyway.
I might not hold the record any more, but do I hold the record for the most sub-30-seconds packs in competitions? I probably do, but I don't want to count in case I'm wrong...
Speed cards is fun to watch and exciting to compete in and makes a great finish to competitions. But what would the scores be like if it was the first of the ten disciplines? Or somewhere in the middle? A lot of the time, the competitors have to get an okay-but-not-spectacular score, to make sure they finish in the position they're aiming for, so there's not always a lot of opportunity to go for that record-breaking fast time.
And speaking of records, when will we see a sub-20-second pack of cards? And on a related note, why was 30 seconds seen as the "four minute mile" of memory competitions for so long? Yes, it's a nice round number, but back in the day, people were really really serious about it as being our Everest.
Long long ago, back in 2006, there was a competition called the Speed Cards Challenge, which consisted of nothing but head-to-head speed cards. It was great, and should happen again. The XMT comes close, obviously, and it'll be interesting to see how the speed cards times go in the future with that - memorising on a computer screen is probably a bit faster than memorising physical cards; it's harder to drop them on the floor, anyway.
I might not hold the record any more, but do I hold the record for the most sub-30-seconds packs in competitions? I probably do, but I don't want to count in case I'm wrong...
Sunday, July 20, 2014
The Friendly Memory Championship 2014, part 9
Spoken numbers!
The world record is getting close to a perfect 400, which was the level at which they changed it from one-every-two-seconds to one-every-second, back in 2001. Will it be changed again? One every half second? Every three-quarters-of-a-second?
There's always the question of language - the attempt to provide the numbers in the language of the competitors' choice way back in 2005 didn't work as well as it might, but it was the right idea and it's strange that nobody's wanted to try it again. So, will it always be in English at every memory competition except the German ones?
I've always suspected that the people who are good at spoken numbers are the people who don't review their written numbers many times, but go through them slowly and carefully to start with. I can't really back this suspicion up with any kind of evidence, though - maybe I'll gather some one day.
The interesting question is why not have other spoken discplines? Or flashing-up-on-screen disciplines? Or, well, any kind of alternative to things written on paper? I can't think what that other alternative would be, but I'm sure there is one out there somewhere.
The world record is getting close to a perfect 400, which was the level at which they changed it from one-every-two-seconds to one-every-second, back in 2001. Will it be changed again? One every half second? Every three-quarters-of-a-second?
There's always the question of language - the attempt to provide the numbers in the language of the competitors' choice way back in 2005 didn't work as well as it might, but it was the right idea and it's strange that nobody's wanted to try it again. So, will it always be in English at every memory competition except the German ones?
I've always suspected that the people who are good at spoken numbers are the people who don't review their written numbers many times, but go through them slowly and carefully to start with. I can't really back this suspicion up with any kind of evidence, though - maybe I'll gather some one day.
The interesting question is why not have other spoken discplines? Or flashing-up-on-screen disciplines? Or, well, any kind of alternative to things written on paper? I can't think what that other alternative would be, but I'm sure there is one out there somewhere.
Saturday, July 19, 2014
The Friendly Memory Championship 2014, part 8
Historic Dates! Also known as Historic and Future Dates. Or just Dates.
The most recently-invented discipline apart from Abstract Images, this one came along in 2001 - I wasn't really involved in memory competitions back then, but I think it came about because they'd decided it would fit the whole millennium standard idea better if there were ten disciplines rather than nine, and Gunther dreamed up this one. He made most of the rules in those days, actually.
The dates range from 1000 to 2099. I have no idea why that was chosen, but it suits my system very nicely, so I can't complain. For the 2000s I use the images starting with H from my cards list. It's a lot more inconvenient for people with a two-digit-image system, because you get a lot of 19s, 18s, 17s and so on.
As has also happened with abstract images, the 1000-point standard lagged behind the top scores for quite a while, leading to the top scorers in this one getting a disproportionate amount of points compared to the other disciplines. I've always thought it would be better to go back to the system of the top score in each discipline gets 100 points, and everyone else's score is proportionate to that.
Thinking up a brief description of a historical event is easy at first, but once you've done a few hundred of them, it gets harder and harder. Actually, it's interesting to go to different events and see how the individual writers of each list approach it. Some people are 'funnier' than others.
Back in ancient times (2002), a few of the events on the list were sort of jokey and related to the year listed, which really shouldn't be done. I'm pretty sure they're always randomised now.
The most recently-invented discipline apart from Abstract Images, this one came along in 2001 - I wasn't really involved in memory competitions back then, but I think it came about because they'd decided it would fit the whole millennium standard idea better if there were ten disciplines rather than nine, and Gunther dreamed up this one. He made most of the rules in those days, actually.
The dates range from 1000 to 2099. I have no idea why that was chosen, but it suits my system very nicely, so I can't complain. For the 2000s I use the images starting with H from my cards list. It's a lot more inconvenient for people with a two-digit-image system, because you get a lot of 19s, 18s, 17s and so on.
As has also happened with abstract images, the 1000-point standard lagged behind the top scores for quite a while, leading to the top scorers in this one getting a disproportionate amount of points compared to the other disciplines. I've always thought it would be better to go back to the system of the top score in each discipline gets 100 points, and everyone else's score is proportionate to that.
Thinking up a brief description of a historical event is easy at first, but once you've done a few hundred of them, it gets harder and harder. Actually, it's interesting to go to different events and see how the individual writers of each list approach it. Some people are 'funnier' than others.
Back in ancient times (2002), a few of the events on the list were sort of jokey and related to the year listed, which really shouldn't be done. I'm pretty sure they're always randomised now.
Friday, July 18, 2014
The Friendly Memory Championship 2014, part 7
It's the discipline whose name really doesn't describe it... Abstract Images!
Here's some useful trivia for you - the first time abstract images was ever included in a memory competition was at the very first Friendly Memory Championship (or Cambridge Memory Championship, as it was called back then), in 2006. Gunther Karsten got the highest score, with 200.
Now, I've said it before and I'll say it again, but we need to do something about Abstract Images. Get rid of it altogether, or change it so that it becomes the kind of test it was supposed to be in the first place. See, you don't need to look at the shapes of the images at all, mostly, you just need to look at the pattern they're filled with. There are 158 of these patterns (I counted them again, I always tell people it's 140-something, but it's definitely 158), and it's pretty simple to learn to recognise them and assign an image to each one, for the purpose of memorising them.
All well and good, but there's no practice material available - the only person who can create abstract images is Phil, and he has to manually convert them into black and white, because the wonderful image-generating program that works so hard to create different shapes that nobody needs to look at creates them in colour, and it was decided early on that colour images would be too easy to memorise without looking at the shapes. This means that long-time competitors have a big advantage over beginners here (and I'm going to keep on saying that, despite Jonas setting world-record scores as soon as he started), and that the whole thing is far more removed from the understanding of 'normal' people than any other discipline in memory competitions.
And it was supposed to be a test of 'natural' memory that would be difficult to apply systems to. That was the original idea behind it, and it was completely subverted by the WMSC getting an external company to create the program and somehow not being able to afford to get them to change it when the program they provided was nothing like what it should have been. I don't know, I just despair about the whole thing, I really do.
On the other hand, it's fun! I like to go down the columns and memorise the images in that order, so that when it comes to the recall I have a choice of five options for each image. It uses up a lot of journeys, though - one day, if I don't manage to get the whole discipline scrapped, I'll think of a way to convert each image into a number from 0 to 9, and turn three of them into one of my objects...
Here's some useful trivia for you - the first time abstract images was ever included in a memory competition was at the very first Friendly Memory Championship (or Cambridge Memory Championship, as it was called back then), in 2006. Gunther Karsten got the highest score, with 200.
Now, I've said it before and I'll say it again, but we need to do something about Abstract Images. Get rid of it altogether, or change it so that it becomes the kind of test it was supposed to be in the first place. See, you don't need to look at the shapes of the images at all, mostly, you just need to look at the pattern they're filled with. There are 158 of these patterns (I counted them again, I always tell people it's 140-something, but it's definitely 158), and it's pretty simple to learn to recognise them and assign an image to each one, for the purpose of memorising them.
All well and good, but there's no practice material available - the only person who can create abstract images is Phil, and he has to manually convert them into black and white, because the wonderful image-generating program that works so hard to create different shapes that nobody needs to look at creates them in colour, and it was decided early on that colour images would be too easy to memorise without looking at the shapes. This means that long-time competitors have a big advantage over beginners here (and I'm going to keep on saying that, despite Jonas setting world-record scores as soon as he started), and that the whole thing is far more removed from the understanding of 'normal' people than any other discipline in memory competitions.
And it was supposed to be a test of 'natural' memory that would be difficult to apply systems to. That was the original idea behind it, and it was completely subverted by the WMSC getting an external company to create the program and somehow not being able to afford to get them to change it when the program they provided was nothing like what it should have been. I don't know, I just despair about the whole thing, I really do.
On the other hand, it's fun! I like to go down the columns and memorise the images in that order, so that when it comes to the recall I have a choice of five options for each image. It uses up a lot of journeys, though - one day, if I don't manage to get the whole discipline scrapped, I'll think of a way to convert each image into a number from 0 to 9, and turn three of them into one of my objects...
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