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!