If you're looking for a memory book...

Nelson Dellis's new book is out on September 25th! There are a lot of books about memory out there, but very few by people who really know what they're talking about and can express it in a fun and readable way, like Nelson! It's got the official Zoomy recommendation!

It's an old men's game

Did you know that nobody born in the 1990s has ever won a grand slam men's singles tennis championship? I think it's quite overwhelmingly awesome that we're now at the end of a 15-year period in which the game has basically been dominated by three people - Federer, Nadal and Djokovic - who are still playing and winning the tournaments today. The last time anyone won their first grand slam was four years ago now, and it looks like extending a good bit further before anyone else does it. I approve. I might take up tennis myself, and show those young people how it's done.

They furnished up an apartment with a Sears and Roebuck sale

I'm moving house - and it's a proper house I'm moving into this time, stairs and everything. I've bought furniture. I've never really done that before, I've always rented furnished flats, but there really don't seem to be any nice ones around here, so I've gone all domestic and bought things from the BHF charity shop. It's all very mature and responsible, I feel quite bad about it.

The grand tour

Okay, so it's now four memory competitions in the next four months that people want me to go to! And they're three international-standard and one world-standard, so the first three would be a really good bit of practice for the fourth!

Germany on 21-22 September, Sweden on 6-7 October, Denmark on 10-11 November and Austria on 14-16 December. That's a really nice schedule! I might just have to do it - my boss yesterday positively encouraged me to take some unpaid days off in addition to my remaining holiday days, so if they really don't want me in the office who am I to argue?

Movie night

Though I've got into the habit of going to the cinema more than once a decade now, it's still really only on long plane journeys that I ever watch a film. And since the selection on Asiana planes at the moment is a bit limited once you've watched Infinity War, Ready Player One and Grease (from the 'classics' selection), I was wondering what else to do with my time on the way home last night - not nearly enough cartoons available to fill the long journey both ways. But the person in the seat in front of me was watching an intriguing-looking Korean film (with English subtitles), so I put that on myself, and it was really great! If you find yourself looking for something to watch, Korean or otherwise, check out Be With You! It's based on a Japanese original, apparently, but the Korean version is really good. I'll maybe try to watch some more of that kind of thing, next time I'm stuck on a plane for hours and hours!

Korea, you've gotta see her

Now this is how to run a memory championship! It's been a great weekend in Seoul, and you can see all the results of the competition here. My own results were nothing to write home about, but actually much better than I'd expected - not having done a single bit of training for many, many months, I was assuming I'd be hopeless, but actually I was running at something like a solid 75% of my optimum capacity all the way through, and felt very good about it. A bit of practice and hard work and I could still get back into this whole memory thing yet!

But let's talk about the wonderful way the whole competition was organised, because I was hugely impressed with this one! It's a real credit to Gyewon Jeong and the army of people working with him, plus veteran show-runners Andy and Angel. We had a spacious room at Seoul University, including big screens at the front of the room showing the time countdowns and all the rest of the stats at the touch of a button. Everybody was allocated a seat on a logical plan of putting the top seeds at the front of the room, separated by lower-ranked players, and (this is the particularly cool part) all the memorisation and recall papers were arranged and sorted into the right order in advance, so the arbiters (lots of them, all entirely clued-up and efficient) could bring them out to the tables with no confusion. No asking people to put their hands up to show which language they wanted, it was all pre-arranged. I love it. The papers all had header sheets as well, to avoid any confusion, and everything worked perfectly flawlessly all weekend.

The stars of the show were Team Mongolia, out in force as usual, and all wearing shirts with their names on them (thank you, Team Mongolia! If only everyone in the world would do that, my life would be so much easier!), and I got to meet Munkhshur and Enkhshur for the first time, as well as returning veteran Shijir-Erdene and many more. Yanjaa was also listed as Mongolian on the results website, but there was a Swedish flag among the ones draped along the side of the room (a union jack for me), so I couldn't completely claim to be the top European there. We also had newcomer Egor Spinu from Moldova and Issa Almgadmi from Libya, with the rest of the 159 competitors made up of many Koreans and a good number of Chinese, Indonesian and Japanese entrants.

There was a free shuttle bus from the official championship hotel to the venue, and lunch at the university (being told that "lunch will be bibimbap on Saturday and bulgogi on Sunday" I was reminded of an old KYTV episode that probably nobody else will remember - "well, you wouldn't do that in the evening, would you?" - but having googled what they are and now tried them, I can heartily recommend them even to people with such unadventurous tastes as mine) and all in all perfect conditions for memorising.

Munkhshur dominated throughout, unsurprisingly enough, including a score of 1100 digits in 15 minutes, which was an exceptional kind of result to get in 30, back in my day. Lkhagvadulam did 1251 binary in five minutes, Yanjaa set two new records with 360 images and 145 words, and Shijir stole the show at the end with a pack of cards in 12.74 seconds! It's getting ridiculous now.

The closing ceremony was also wonderful - the sponsors, Cho-A Bitone, gave us an entertaining little show with a Cho-A special images memory contest and a true-or-false quiz, both of which achieved the double purpose of promoting their products and showing that they knew what the whole memory sport thing was all about; it reminded me of the classic German championship events, but this one was if anything rather better! Then the awards ceremony wasn't at all over-long, but still presented the prizes for everybody nicely, honouring the top three in each age group for Koreans and overall. Great stuff, all round! There need to be more competitions like this!

Recognition

Someone recognised me on the train earlier today, saying I was part of his study of savants and synaesthesia a few years ago. I hope it was an interesting study - if I knew about it at the time, I've well and truly forgotten it now. But you might say that's a good omen for the upcoming competition, if not for the fact that as mentioned yesterday, I've done absolutely no training at all and so can't expect to get any kind of results there.

On the other hand, apparently a typhoon is due to hit Korea at roughly the same time as my plane, so it'll be a fun journey.

Return to Redditch

Actually, it's hardly worth this quick return, because tomorrow night I'm jetting off to Seoul for my first memory competition (as a competitor) since whenever it was that I went to Canada. April? In any case, that was also the last time I did any memory training except for playing on Memory League. I've never gone to a competition with so very little preparation before, so it should be fun!

Then after that, I have various people trying to convince me to go to Denmark, Germany and Austria over the next few months for more memory championships (two internationals and one world - big events of the kind I've always preferred!), so I'll have to see what I can do about that. It's not a money thing - I'm now officially debt-free again, and overpaid, so the main difficulty is refraining from handing in my notice and living a life of unemployed luxury again - so much as a getting-time-off-work thing. I can maybe arrange my remaining holiday days to accommodate most or all of them, but it'll take a bit of thinking about.

Also, why am I intrigued by an email I got from a recruitment agency today, about a job as a finance analyst with a salary slightly less than I get at the moment and based in Leicester? It made me think "ooh, that looks quite nice, actually", when what I should be looking at right now if I want to change jobs at all is something mindless and stress-free that pays much less. I have no idea how my mind works, sometimes.

Residences

I'm in a student hall of residence in London again - the same one as last year, in fact. And I'm sort of 90% sure I'm even in the exact same room I was in last year, too! Or at least one with the same kind of stains in the same kind of places. Or maybe they just make them all identical like that.

Anyway, it's only a flying visit to the MSO this year, because of the flying visit I'm making to Korea later in the week. We've had the Marathon Memory today, which all went well, and then tomorrow it's Natural and Speed. I'll write about it at length, if I ever do get the time...

Speed Memory

I'd better get this last part written before the competition on Monday afternoon. This calls for.... speed!

 This will be, despite the name, a nice relaxed championship, with no need to hurry through the disciplines. But the memorising itself will be very fast!

 We start with dates - a list of historic events (fictional), with a year beside them. Years can range from 1000 to 2100. You need to remember the year each thing happened, during the 5-minute memorisation time. Then in the recall time, you get the list of events back, in a different order, and have to fill in the year next to each one you can remember. So it's not necessary to remember them in sequence; just match the year with the event. One point for a correct answer, but minus half a point for any year written down incorrectly! If in doubt, leave it out!

Numbers - and if you read the Marathon Memory description, this is exactly like the 30-minute numbers, except you only get five minutes to memorise this time. And with this one, we get two tries at it, with the best score from the two being the one that counts. The numbers come in rows of 40, and you have to get a complete row right to score 40 points. One error or blank space in a row gets you 20, two or more errors and it's zero for the whole row. Which is a major loss of points in this one!
As with the other disciplines, you can stop part way through the last row you write down, and score for those numbers only in that row.

 The classic final discipline of memory competitions! You get a pack of cards, and have to memorise the sequence as fast as possible. You get a maximum of five minutes, but can put the pack down and stop the clock at any time. Fastest time wins, as long as you recall all the cards correctly! This is done by sorting an unshuffled pack into the sequence of the one you've memorised, in the space of five minutes.

Natural Memory

On the morning of Monday 20th, at the Mind Sports Olympiad, we have the Natural Memory Championship - the second part of the big MSO memory event. There's still time to register!

Possibly "natural" isn't quite the right word for this; it doesn't give enough credit to all the hard work and training that the memory masters do in these disciplines, but it's true that these ones are the bits of any memory championship where complete beginners have the best chance of getting a score that comes somewhere near to the scores achieved by the experts.

 Do the N and M look like some kind of natural field of grass, with the other letters floating above them? Because that's the kind of effect I was going for...

 Names - and the names attached to these pictures of people's faces might not be ones you've ever seen before; they're randomly selected from all over the world, and will very probably be a first name from one country and a last name from an entirely different culture, attached to a face that looks like it comes from somewhere entirely different again. But unlike the numbers and cards, you don't have to remember them in any particular order - you just have to remember which names went with which face, and then fill in the names under the faces (presented in a different sequence) on the recall papers.

 Words, on the other hand, you do need to remember in the order you're given them. Read down the columns; each one has 20 words in it (mostly concrete nouns, with a smattering of more abstract words added to the mix), and you need to get them all right to get a score of 20 for the column. One error reduces the column score to 10, two errors and it's zero. But a simple spelling mistake just loses you the point for that word, so reducing it to 19 as in the first column above. For the last column you complete, you can fill in a partial list, and for example score 9 points for writing correctly the first 9 words.

Images, which will be random pictures like the ones above, come in rows of five, and you have to remember the sequence of each row. The recall page will show each row with the images in a different order, and you have to fill in the numbers 1 to 5 underneath them to represent the original order. Five points if you get a row correct, you can leave a row blank without penalty, but if you fill one in with a mistake, there's a penalty, minus one point. So in the picture above, someone's scored 9 points from the first four rows.

They've also forgotten to fill their name in at the top of the page - everyone should always make sure to do that.

Marathon Memory

We're just over a week away from the three-in-one memory competition extravaganza at the Mind Sports Olympiad, and it's not too late to register, if you want to join the fun! There are three separate competitions, each with their own theme and medals to fight for, and if you want to compete in all three, they add together to make the overall MSO Champion. Tonight, I'm shining the spotlight on the first competition, which takes up all day on Sunday 19th - Marathon Memory.

It's going to be a long day, with not much time to rest in between long-term memory tasks. And we start with 30 minutes to memorise as many binary digits as possible, after which you then have 60 minutes to write down what you've memorised. As you can see from the hopefully-comprehensible diagrams above, they come in rows of 30 ones and noughts, and you have to get a complete row correct to get 30 points. One mistake, or blank space, in a row gets you 15 points, two or more errors and there's no score for that row. The last row, and only the last row, that you memorise can be partially filled in - as above, our competitor got to the 19th digit of the 20th row, and scored 19 points.

Then we'll go into a comparative rest interval, with our first trial at spoken numbers. You'll hear 200 digits spoken aloud (on a recording) at a rate of one digit per second. And you have to recall the lot - you score points for each correct digit, but only up to the first mistake. So be careful, but there are three trials at this (with an increasing number of digits each time), and only your best score from the three is counted.

Then we go into our 30-minute decimal digits, which work exactly the same way as the binary digits up above, only this time they range from 0 to 9, and they come in rows of 40. The scoring works the same way again. After that, we'll take our only significant break of the day (assuming we managed to start fairly promptly at 10:00, it'll be about 2pm by now), to let people get some lunch and cool their brain down a little, and then we get back into the swing of things with some more spoken numbers.

It's just the same as before, except now you have to sit through 300 spoken digits, a whole five minutes' worth, before you get to recall them. Even if you lose track after six digits, you still have to patiently sit in silence until they've all finished playing, I'm afraid.

And then we get into cards. Real, physical packs of cards, shuffled randomly of course (do bring your own if you prefer; most people do), and 30 minutes to memorise as many as possible. The 60 minutes of recall is done on papers like the ones above. For example, if the first card in the first pack is the two of spades, write a 2 next to the spades symbol in the first row. Then a 4 next to the diamond in the second row, and so on until the whole pack is filled in. Once again, for the final pack you looked at, you can fill in a partial one and score the number of cards you wrote down; for all the others, it's 52 for a complete pack, 26 for one mistake, zero for two or more errors (which includes switching the order of two cards).

And finally, although everyone will certainly be exhausted by now, there's a final chance to improve your spoken numbers score, with a mammoth 550 digits. After the recall of that, we'll have come to the end of an eight-hour day of arduous memory, but it'll all be worth it for the prizegiving ceremony straight afterwards - there'll probably be a podium to stand on, and everything!

Buzzing

I just saw Ant-Man and the Wasp - two visits to the cinema in a year, I'm definitely a movie-fanatic now! And I'm still completely in love with the Marvel Cinematic Universe. Do I really have to wait until next year for the next one?

Anyway, here's another thing I do, thanks to Joe and Nick in the office - HQ Trivia. It's fun! Anyone else who plays the British version want to be friends and share answers? I only occasionally know things, but it does sometimes happen.

Return to the scene of past glories

Remember eleven years ago, when the UK Memory Championship was in Highley, and I thought it would be a cool and appropriate tribute to my then-recently-deceased father to travel there on the Severn Valley Railway on a steam train? Only for it to turn out that the railway line had been destroyed by floods a little while before, so I had to go there in a (shudder) taxi, probably, unless someone gave me a lift. Someone probably did give me a lift, come to think of it. But it would still have been a lot better to have gone there on an actual steam train. Anyway, I got over the disappointment the next day when I became the first person to ever memorise a pack of cards in under 30 seconds, and so never did think about the Severn Valley Railway ever again, even when I moved to Redditch, which is really not far away from it at all.

Until a couple of weeks ago, that is, when a friend from America said he was coming over here and wanted to see the Severn Valley Railway, and would I like to go along with him? So that's what we're doing tomorrow.

Kidderminster, where the steamy railway meets the normal railway, is close to Redditch, but on a different train line, so it takes ages to take the train from one to the other. It's a lot like living in Boston and wanting to get the train to Spalding, if that analogy makes any sense to anyone. Lincolnshire people, maybe. But there is a station on Redditch's little branch line, Barnt Green, that the main line from Birmingham to Worcester thunders through, and commuter trains stop there once a day in each direction to allow people who live in Barnt Green to go to and from work in Bromsgrove and Worcester if they really want to. It's like the train from Derby to Sheffield that stops at Belper once a day for the same reasons, if that analogy makes sense to anyone at all. Wow, I'm becoming some kind of train nerd.

So I can get to Kidderminster tomorrow by switching tracks at Barnt Green, rather than doing what you have to do to get anywhere else from Redditch, and go all the way into Birmingham and out again. That's fun, but it's not nearly as fun as the return journey. Just once a day, you can get from Kidderminster to Redditch by going Kidderminster-Droitwich Spa (13 minutes), then another train from Droitwich Spa to Bromsgrove (9 minutes), another one from Bromsgrove to Barnt Green (6 minutes), and a fourth train from Barnt Green to Redditch (10 minutes)! Four short hops, and the journey time is reduced to only about twice as long as it takes by car! I've got to try that tomorrow, and see if all four trains are running on time...

Teenage wasteland

Still the best superhero comic on the shelves at the moment, Runaways is now up to #11 of the latest series, and (impressively, considering how Marvel comics do things these days), will be continuing past #12, although the sales figures aren't spectacular. Which they should be; it's really that good. It is selling better than my other favourite comics, Squirrel Girl and Astro City, but they're more kind of niche things, while Runaways is something that really should be read by everyone. In fact, I order you all to go and read it. I do realise that American comics nowadays are so expensive that only the four richest kings of Europe can afford them, but they do come in very slightly cheaper compiled paperback editions, and there are some really cool oversized volumes of the early Runaways stories, 18 issues to a book, that I'd recommend checking out!

Someone on the internet has kindly summarised all the Runaways' appearances here, if you want to know exactly what I'm ordering you to read, but the only bits that I would call essential reading are the 42 issues of the original series written by Brian K Vaughan, and now this new series by Rainbow Rowell. I mean, there are other good things on that list too - Avengers Undercover really should be on everyone's must-read list, it's brilliant, but from the perspective of Runaways readers it's as well to skip the characters' appearances in that period; they're all mentioned when necessary in the new series, and smoothed over as much as possible where people are acting wildly out of character.

It's a problem with lesser-known superhero characters when their comic gets cancelled and they start showing up occasionally in other people's comics. Anything that happens to them is inevitably going to be reversed when next someone wants to write them, and everything they do inevitably doesn't feel right when it's not written by their original writer. That's why this new series is so fantastic on many levels - not only does it perfectly feel like the Vaughan-era originals, grown a couple of years older, it acknowledges and treats as important everything that happened to them in other comics, even when busily reversing them.

Besides, it contributes nicely to the general theme of the comic - teenagers who've gone through traumatic experiences and bonded. It all started when they discovered their parents were secretly super-villains, and escalated through a series of adventures on the run until the gang had the added burden of (indirectly) killing the parents and many another crisis to try to come to terms with. This issue, #11, is a 'downtime' kind of story where they all just hang around and talk through things. Which is a bit unusual for an eleventh issue (comics tend to come in six-issue storylines), but then Runaways has never really been about heroes fighting bad guys - in the previous ten issues, the worst enemy they've faced has been Molly's mad scientist grandmother. It's a great place to join in and get to know the characters; otherwise, please go out and buy the collection of the first six issues, and then add the upcoming paperback of 7-12 to your shopping list too. You won't regret it!

"Churchill" (in an appropriately contemptuous voice)

The BBC make you create an account if you want to listen to the radio online now, which I think is quite shocking. They'll be making me buy a TV licence next. But it's worth it anyway, to listen to The Quanderhorn Xperimentations. It's really brilliant, and exactly the kind of thing there should be more of on the radio. Go and listen, if you haven't already!

Everyone's a winner

Or at least Novak Djokovic and the French football team are. And for that matter, so is John Graham, who's just won the US Memory Championship! This is very cool, because he's another new, up-and-coming memory star from America who might well go on to do great things in future. The days when I was too polite to say how very low the standard at the US Championship was are long ago now, it's definitely one of the focal points of major memory cleverness even in the absence of Alex! Plus, since the competition resolutely sticks to the principles of being an entirely different format from any other memory competition in the world, it's always fun to follow! I must go out there and watch it again some time; it's been way too long since I did that.

Also, here's what I would do if I had lots of money and resources - run an international Memory League team championship! Each country has a team of five players, there's something like four countries involved, and everybody competes simultaneously to get the best score they can at each of the five disciplines. Each team nominates one member to be a specialist in each discipline, so everyone gets their moment in the limelight, and you get three attempts at each one.

The seating would be arranged like this - imagine a big TV studio, lots of lights and things, and an audience watching. Centre stage is one big seat for each cards specialist, sitting at a computer screen, not able to see each other or the big giant screen overhead for the audience. The four cards specialists come out (to cheers from the audience), and stats about them are shown on the big screen. Four more sets of seats are to the sides, further back, for the rest of the teams, and all the players sit down simultaneously and memorise a pack of cards as fast as possible. The audience watch along on five quartered split-screen displays. At the end of each attempt they all get up and see everybody's scores, then sit down again and try to beat it. The 20 competitors are ranked in order of their scores, 20 points for the best, 19 for the next and so on. Specialists get double points in their specialist discipline.

Repeat for images, names, numbers and words! Throw in some expert camera-work and commentary from the likes of Florian, put the whole thing on YouTube, and I'm sure the TV people around the world will come running with wads of money in their hands! And even if they don't, it'd be a lot of fun for everyone!

The four corners

I'm officially going to Seoul in August, which is really extremely cool. I've even resolved to do some proper practice, although that was a week or two ago and I haven't actually done any yet. But good intentions can take you quite far in this world.

And speaking of going far, there was a thing going around the internet recently about the furthest north, south, east and west you've travelled. My north is Gothenburg, east is Tokyo, south is Rio de Janeiro, and west is San Diego. Which took a bit of checking on maps - I thought Westlock was more north than it actually is, but it's not really into the proper north bit of Canada, it's just above the line where everyone in Canada actually lives.

So now I need to beat those records, naturally. I should go to Sydney and beat the south and east (or west, if I go the other way) records in one fell swoop. Or to a different part of Sweden, or Norway, because Gothenburg's only just fractionally more northern than Aberdeen!

Clash of arms (or of small discs, anyway)

One thing I didn't mention yesterday about our room in the castle keep, was that it's full of swords and shields, various torture devices, helmets, and a lot of dressing-up clothes. All of which, Marie assured us, we were allowed to play with, because they were only replicas. But we mainly contented ourselves with playing othello instead, and although my own performance was spectacularly rubbish, the whole thing was an absolutely thrilling tournament!

After round 6, in which Imre lost to Bruce, Imre was still the leader on 5 wins, but there were a whole five people in joint second place behind him on 4! And I wasn't one of them, but never mind, I'll spend the next year practicing and win it in 2019.

The way it all shook out in the end, Roy (who'd unexpectedly beaten practically everyone) played the grand final against Imre, but couldn't stop his continual UK-championship-winning streak, now on four years and counting. Iain and Bruce played the third-place playoff match, which ended up an especially exciting draw, so Iain finished third on his disc count in the round-robin.

Also, happy 372nd birthday to Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz!

Oldcastle died a martyr, and this is not the man

It's the othello nationals, in the scenic location of the confusingly-named Newcastle Castle. Which is, of course, a very old castle.

You can see how it must have happened, obviously. "Why-aye, man," one of the founders of Newcastle must have said, for that is how people from Newcastle invariably start a conversation, "let's name our 'toon' [for that is how people in Newcastle pronounce the word 'town'] after this lovely new castle of ours!"

"Jolly good idea!" the other founder of Newcastle must have replied, "for while the castle will inevitably grow old in time, it won't be until long after the pair o'wers [meaning 'the two of us'] are dead and gone, so it won't be US who get jeered at for living in a 'toon' called Newcastle with a very old castle!"

In any case, the whole thing's gone on for about a thousand years too long for them to change the name now, so we're stuck with it. As for the othello playing, interesting features included a pre-competition excursion to see a were-rabbit that lurks nearby, and me generally playing badly but getting more discs than I really deserved. We have nine players overall, a nice number for a nine-round competition (though ten would be even better), and played the first four games of the round-robin this afternoon.

I started out against David Stephenson, playing his first tournament for about 25 years, and lost 34-30, then in the second round lost 33-31 to Roy. But I regained the momentum by scoring a point in the third round against that perpetual loser, 'bye', and finished the day off with a (rather fortunate) 36-28 win over Bruce.

And it's finely poised on the leaderboard, with Imre and Iain on 4 out of 4, then a whole five other people on 2, including me. So if I was to somehow win all my games tomorrow, I'd be entirely possibly in the top two, who contest the grand final! But I'd probably have to remember how to play the game first.

We had dinner this evening in the Herb Garden restaurant, notable for having a giant horse statue, wearing roller-skates and leg-warmers, outside the door. It just needs a horn, and you've got Marigold Heavenly Nostrils.