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.