Interview

There's a journalist who's sent me four emails over the course of the last day, asking for a quick interview. I've just been too lazy to reply (I've got the usual pile of emails from friends that I haven't responded to yet, let alone the emails from the international press [by which I mean Radio Nottingham and a French magazine], so I apologise to anyone reading this who's waiting to hear from me), and it occurred to me that I should prepare some answers in advance, since people always ask the same questions. So, all you journalists out there, here's the Zoomy FAQ:

Q: How do you remember things?
A: I don't remember things, I'm just really good at guessing.

Q: I've forgotten where I put my car keys, can you help?
A: They're on the kitchen floor, near the sink.

Q: Have any interesting memory-related things happened to you, involving Japanese chimpanzees?
A: Yes, I was once abducted by Japanese chimpanzees and forced to compete against them in a series of memory tests. I won easily, and the chimps conceded that humans are superior to them in every way.

Q: Why is your lucky shirt lucky?
A: Luckily enough, it conceals a very lucky small computer, hidden under the picture of a dragon, into which I can type all the numbers/words/abstract images I'm pretending to memorise, pretending to scratch my chest. Then in the recall period, by a remarkable stroke of luck, I can print out a perfectly-recalled paper and win every competition. Also, the shirt was bought for my by my gal pal Emma Picot.

Q: What's your favourite colour?
A: I'm actually blind, and don't know what colours are.

Q: Please recite pi to 50,000 decimal places.
A: I've forgotten it. The 50,001st digit is 3, though.

Ovgu!

The Mental Calculation World Cup was held at Otto von Guericke University in Magdeburg, and everyone got official university T-shirts that said "JETZT ABER OVGU!" in big letters on the back. I was confidently expecting 'ovgu' to turn out to be an obscenity in the native language of one of the competitors, but unfortunately it didn't. Still, I'm sure one day I'll be walking along the street and suddenly find myself punched in the back of the head by an offended Uzbek.

But nevertheless, I'm in a good mood today, because I got Switzerland in the office World Cup sweepstake, and they unexpectedly won. It's another of those omens I like to attribute to the World Memory Championship - if Switzerland win the competition, I will be absolutely guaranteed to win too!

Whine, whine, whine

It seems like all I do lately is whine about lacking motivation to practice memory. You'd think losing my favourite world record would get me back into it, but no. (Theatrical sigh) Ah well, maybe I'll just go to China and set a new world record for the worst ever score by a reigning world champion. It'll be hard to beat Clemens Mayer's 2007 record of scoring zero points by not competing, but I'll try.

Bah.

This is what comes of playing Emile Heskey. Why has Fabio Capello not listened to my constant moaning in private conversations with friends? He's only got himself to blame.

Anyway, this morning, I went into the Oxfam shop where I found that Bobby Bear annual a few weeks ago, and what do you know, now they've got Teddy Tail's Annual 1934! I'm quite certain that wasn't there the last time. But it's come from the same person - the Bobby Bear had 'David Hill, Xmas 1932' written by an adult on the inside front cover, this one has 'David Hill, 6, Xmas 1933' written presumably by David himself. He'd also grown out of the habit of scribbling on his books with pencil over the course of the year. He might have been disappointed with his 1933 Xmas present, though - it's nowhere near as much fun as the Bobby Bear. I know Teddy had slightly more history and prestige behind him, but his adventures aren't as interesting.

Anyway, I need to track down David Hill or the relatives who are posthumously giving his books to Oxfam - I have visions of a whole house full of classic comics that are being chucked in the recycling bin as we speak...

Congratulations!! You are the master of othello game!

You can play the 1988 NES othello video game here, if you want. It's very complimentary to you if you beat it.

Head-counting

I haven't really got the time to talk at length about the Mental Calculation World Cup, but I should just make it clear that it was an excellent competition, very well organised and a lot of fun. And the fact that a whole lot of grown men were hugely outclassed by an eleven-year-old girl makes it all the more fun! It's interesting that the best overall score in the events that all the competitors (except for me) had prepared for in advance was by the aforementioned youngest competitor, and the best score in the 'surprise tasks' was by the oldest. That probably says something about age or educational standards or something like that.

Anyway, I need to practice mental calculation some more. But more urgently, I need to practice memory. Starting next week, I'm going back to posting daily training scores on my blog. It worked for a fortnight or so, let's see if it can work again.

German Gehirn

Okay, lots of exciting adventures to describe, not much time (I've got a busy schedule of doing nothing planned), I'll just summarise things tonight. Firstly, it was the South German Memory Championship in Stuttgart, and I did more or less reasonably well. Only got a fairly lousy sub-300 score in speed numbers, and then a not-quite-my-best 870 in speed binary, something tolerable but not as good as I should be getting in abstract images, and perfectly reasonable scores in the German-language versions of names, words and dates.

Just as an aside, memorising words in a language you don't understand is an interesting process - I tend to make up meanings for all the words I don't recognise, which in some ways is more conducive to creating a memorable mental story than a list of randome words I do understand. It takes longer, though. And I would have got a better score if not for the internet, too. While recalling, I wrote down the word 'abbrechen', and thought to myself "Is that right? Doesn't feel right, but if it's not, where would I have got the word 'abbrechen' from? I have no idea what that means. It must be right!" Actually, it wasn't - the word was 'abschlagen'. So how did 'abbrechen' get into my head? From the internet cafe I popped into on my way to the competition, of course. When German computers ask you to confirm something, they don't say 'OK' or 'Cancel', they say 'OK' or 'Abbrechen', of course. Stupid internet.

Still, I got to have fun with other weird words - three in a row were 'Laborantin', 'Entwurf' and 'Mäuler'. I guessed (rightly, as it turns out), that the first is a female lab technician, but had no idea about the next two. However, I did happen to know that 'Ente' means 'duck', and 'Maulwurf' means 'mole', so obviously this mad Laborantin has created two unholy mixtures of mole and duck, which can both swim and burrow and so might possibly be the most advanced species on Earth.

Anyway, I was talking about the competition in general, wasn't I? I finished off with a fairly good 29.71 seconds in speed cards, which would have been just about enough to (unofficially, since I'm not South-German) "win" the championship if Simon hadn't managed to record a time. So I wandered over to see how he'd done, just in time to see him successfully recalling his pack, and revealing a staggering time of 21.90 seconds! For crying out loud! That was my favourite world record! And it's going to be really hard to get back, too! I have beaten that time in practice, but only by basically running super-fast through the cards, naming the 26 images and hoping they stuck in my brain. It works maybe one time in ten, so I can't really do it in a competition...

Anyway, apart from that, it was a great championship! The number of great German memorisers involved in organising or just hanging around was quite staggering - MemoryXL is an awesome organisation and we really need to get together and create a British equivalent. If only I wasn't so lazy.

Still, I didn't have time to stick around, I had to scurry up north to Magdeburg for the Mental Calculation World Cup, but I'll tell you about that tomorrow - this 'summarise' thing has turned into a bit of an essay. I didn't win that one either, if you were wondering.

Itinerary

Is a difficult word to pronounce if you have trouble with the letter R. So here are my plans for the next few days:

Tomorrow, crack of dawn, get train to Manchester Airport and fly to Stuttgart, arrive there pleasantly early in afternoon, find hotel (shouldn't be too difficult, even with my sense of direction, it's just over the road from the train station), see sights. I've been to Stuttgart before, a couple of times, but I'm sure the sights have changed a bit since last time.

Saturday, find University of Stuttgart (also right next to hotel and train station) and memorise small amounts of numbers, cards etc in a no-pressure kind of way, safe in the knowledge that my scores won't be counted because I'm not South German. Note to self - avoid wearing lederhosen, just in case someone mistakes me for a South German and publishes my terrible scores for the world to see. Also avoid making lederhosen-themed jokes in case they offend genuine South Germans. Then after competition, beetle off back to the airport, fly to Berlin, get a train to Magdeburg, get an S-Bahn to Barleben, find hotel (quite some way from the train station and it'll be dark by then - this is the point where the schedule might go wrong), go to sleep.

Sunday, be ferried back into Magdeburg by Mental Calculations World Cup organisers (hotels, meals, guided tours etc are all free of charge for competitors, as always), pose for photo, then try to remember how to do mental calculations. I haven't calculated anything mentally since 2006, so my hopes aren't high for lifting the World Cup for England.

Monday, more of the same.

Tuesday, get away from Barleben/Magdeburg in time to see the sights of Berlin, a city I've never once visited despite all my millions of trips to Germany, then fly back to London (because that was cheaper than Manchester, not to mention Birmingham which is much easier for me to get to and from by train but fails to provide any reasonably-priced flights on the days I want to fly to and from there). Get home probably late at night due to unexpected delays, go to bed just in time to get up for work on Wednesday. If I didn't find this kind of thing so much fun, I'd drop dead from mental exhaustion and stress.

Encouraging

I did a 30-minute cards practice tonight (it was going to be hour cards, but I felt my mind wandering about 15 minutes into it, so I changed my plans), and did 15 packs, all perfectly recalled without any real problems. That's pretty good, really - when I'm properly in form, I do 18. Maybe in a week or two I'll be back up to full speed.

Although on the other hand, it is the World Cup. Maybe if I'm lucky we'll get knocked out early as a result of unfathomably picking Emile Heskey, and there'll be no important games to distract me.

Last Call?

Good grief, it's only May. Since when are world memory championships organised so far in advance that they're sending me emails insisting that I register at this point in the year? Still, I thought I should reproduce it here, for the benefit of anyone who reads my blog but isn't on the WMSC mailing list:

There are now just twelve weeks to go to the 2010 World Memory Championships in China. With a prize fund of US$ 92,000, this is the biggest amount in prizes ever offered for a memory championships. So far competitors from 14 countries are registered, and this is expected to increase over the next few weeks. The logistics of organising a World Championships are enormous. Competitors may ask to compete in their native language, and resources required to prepare and translate the memorisation and recall sheets. In addition, arbiters are required who are fluent in all these languages. As a result, of this, it may be necessary to close the registrations earlier than in previous year, so that there is sufficient time for preparations to be made.

This is therefore the Last Call for competitors to register for the 2010 World Memory Championships . If you are planning to compete, please do not assume that the organisers will know this instinctively, if you haven't completed your registration form. Please click on http://www.worldmemorychampionships.com/2010RegistrationForm.asp and do so without delay. This also applies to our Elite Competitors - our Top Ten Memorisers. We can only make preparations for you, if we know you are planning to compete.

All competitors, regardless of rank, are require to pay their competition fee in advance of the competition. Registrations without a fee are not confirmed.

Also, please allow plenty of time to organise your travel visa to enter China. This may well take longer than expected. If you require a formal invitation, please email me by return.

The 2010 World Memory Championships in China promise to be the most spectacular so far. Don't miss out by leaving your registration too late.

I can't help thinking the "please do not assume that the organisers will know this instinctively" is inspired by my tendency not to tell anyone I'm coming to competitions and assuming they'll make all the necessary arrangements anyway. But if they really insist, I'll do it tomorrow. Can't be bothered tonight.

Also, "As a result, of this, it may be necessary to close the registrations earlier than in previous year, so that there is sufficient time for preparations to be made."? As a result of what? Everything that the first paragraph says has also applied in every previous world championship.

Still, it can't be a bad thing that everything's getting done in advance. Unless it gets cancelled again. Go and register, everyone!

Sluggish

Well, having done no memory training yesterday, I eventually managed to force myself to do a 30-minute-binary practice today, and wow, I don't remember ever being so slow and lumbering at memorising 1s and 0s. It's been a while since I last practiced, I know, but even so, today was exceptional. I had to really give myself a mental kick up the backside, repeatedly, not to give up half-way and go and do something else, but at least I managed to get over that hurdle and now, theoretically, it should be easier to get into the swing of things tomorrow.

But as for today, I only got through four and a half pages in the 30 minutes. I normally aim for seven and a half as a best-case-scenario, although only if my brain is running in a super-speedy kind of way do I get that far. I don't recall ever not getting to the end of the fifth page before, it's a bit scary.

Thing is, though, going so slowly makes my recall much more accurate - I normally think I'm doing well if I get about 80% of the rows correct, whereas today it was very close to 100%, and I ended up with a score of 3210, which is... well, it's not what I'd call 'good', but if I'm having a bad day I'm more or less satisfied with anything over 3000. And maybe next time I can increase the speed a bit without dropping too much of the accuracy. Maybe. We'll see, but if I can chain myself to the desk all day tomorrow, I might start thinking it's still possible to do well in Guangzhou.

(It isn't, but I like to try to be optimistic anyway)

Everybody, have you heard?

I think everybody probably has, but I was listening to the radio tonight when they played this completely awesome song that I've never heard before. A bit of internet research reveals that it's been covered by everybody in the universe and featured in no end of films and TV shows that I've heard of but not seen. But now I've officially added it to my mental list of great songs that I'm aware of the existence of. I wonder how many other classics there are out there that are still avoiding me?

Bank hol

Okay, this upcoming three-day weekend is officially, scientifically, the make-or-break moment for the 2010 world memory championship, in so far as it involves me. If I can do a proper weekend's hard work at memorising things for long periods of time, I can still possibly get back into championship-winning form. If I can't, I might as well give up on the idea and find another way to spend my summer. We'll just have to see.

It seems I'm too nerdy to wear a nerdy shirt

During all the excitement of Pac-Man's birthday last week, I spent some time looking for interesting Pac-Man themed websites. One of the coolest things was this shirt on the Errorwear website - it's a picture of level 256, when the program's level counter (having only been allocated two digits of hexadecimal to keep track of how many levels you've played) resets to zero and causes the game to get horribly confused and (by an interesting chain reaction of confusion) replace the right-hand half of the screen with colourful gibberish symbols. "Ooh, groovy!" I thought to myself. "I might have to buy one of those!" And then I looked more closely and read the little description... There is no level 256 in Pac Man. Upon reaching this summit, the game simply breaks, and this is how it looks. For that added touch, we've also set the displayed score to be 3,333,360 which is the highest possible score. If you eat every dot, every ghost, and every fruit for 255 levels, this screen and this score are your rewards.

But, but, but... that's not right! Actually, the game doesn't completely break as soon as you get to level 256 - Pac-Man and the ghosts can still move about what remains of the maze, and move freely around the garbled right-hand side (except for a few bits of wall here and there), you can eat all the dots on the left and the nine dots (some of which are invisible) that appear on the right, and keep scoring points. Once you've eaten them all, you just have to sit around and wait for the ghosts to kill you, because the game doesn't register that the level is over until 244 dots have been eaten and there aren't that many dots on the screen, but the game still technically works. The maximum 3,333,360 is the score you get if you score every possible point, including the ones on level 256. So you can't see a score of 3,333,360 on the screen at the start of level 256, like on the T-shirt! (and ANYWAY, the score display only shows six digits, so when you get above a million it just resets to zero again). This shirt is fundamentally inaccurate! I can't wear that!

It's great to be such a pedant, it really is.

On an unrelated note, if you ever get to watch the Japanese memory documentary, pay attention to one particularly exciting bit - they use a 'walking' sequence! Every documentary that has ever been made about me, the director has got me to walk along some pavement somewhere, with the idea that they could use it to link two other sequences together. It's usually raining, I'm generally fed up with filming at this point, and the walking footage always, without exception, ends up on the cutting-room floor. But in this one, check it out, there's me and Boris, carrying umbrellas and walking towards the university in Tokyo. You can't hear the dialogue, but I'm saying something along the lines of "Every documentary that has ever been made about me, the director has got me to walk along some pavement somewhere..."

And on another unrelated note, has it ever occurred to you, as it did to me and one of my reading kids today, that Sally and her brother from The Cat In The Hat must be about sixty years old by now? I wonder what they're doing now.

Backwards house

I mentioned last year that when it's hot, the living room and kitchen in my flat get all the sun and heat in the mornings, and the bedrooms in the afternoon. This might be a good thing for weekend memory training - forced out of the room with the TV and internet connection, I can spend the mornings in my spare-room-cum-study, memorising cards and things, and then when the sun creeps round to the back windows, escape it back in front of the telly when Doctor Who comes on.

I've only seen three episodes of the new series, for one reason or another. I always seem to be out on Saturday nights nowadays. So I still haven't made my mind up about Matt Smith...

It's like the end of an era

My trusty chess clock (which has never in its life timed a game of chess, but is very useful for othello) started saying "bat" at me yesterday, which is chess-clock-ese for "I need a new battery or four, or else I'm going to stop timing things for you." On opening it up, I found that two of the batteries in it are Woolworth's own brand ones. How deeply disturbing it is that I won't be able to buy any identical ones to replace them!

Actually, I can't remember how I got them in the first place - I've never in my life bought cheap batteries, I'm a sucker for advertising and I buy whatever the pink bunnies tell me to buy (obeying the pink bunnies causes me a lot of problems in life). They must have either come with the clock (I don't think they did) or been in some other appliance I stole the batteries from. Anyway, I'll have to throw them out and symbolically close the chapter of British life that was Woolworth's (or, as one blog-commenter once ordered me to write it, Woolworths). Unless anyone else in the world has still got some Woolworth's batteries on the go, which they almost certainly have.

And by the way, I don't mean 'throw them out', I mean 'put them in the battery recycling bin in my local Boots, obviously'.

Hillsborough is a very hilly place

I hadn't considered it before, despite it being my ancestral homeland, but the 'hill' part of Hillsborough is probably because there's lots of ups and downs there. Anyway, it was to the Hillsborough area of Sheffield that ten othello players flocked this morning for the latest regional tournament. I flocked rather later than the others, not having got out of bed in time to get the early train, and also didn't bring my othello set as I'd promised because I couldn't find one of the boxes of discs (no good ever comes of tidying up your flat for the benefit of Japanese TV crews). I didn't think that'd be a problem, though, since we always have enough boards, but it turned out that this was the one tournament where we didn't.

Lately we've become very uncoordinated at getting boards, clocks etc to the people who can bring them to the next event - this is almost certainly Geoff's fault for moving to Denmark and leaving the uncoordinated British to their own devices. Still, we improvised with three good boards, one rubbish titchy Character board and one i-phone othello app. There also weren't any transcript sheets, so we weren't able to preserve our games for posterity.

I arrived in time to find Iain waiting for our game - we played our game inside while the rest of the gang were out in a conservatory where the light was too bright to see anything and the temperature was somewhere in excess of 100 degrees, and I ended up winning. I'm not sure how, exactly, but it's the end result that counts. That's the first game Iain has lost in a regional this year, after draws with me in Oadby and Ian in London.

The tournament moved inside before everyone melted, to the main room of the pub - we weren't paying anything for the venue, but did have to put up with the general background noise. I proceeded to lose to Roy and Steve, as I generally do far more than I really should, while Ian drew with Iain again to head the leaderboard at lunch. After that, I beat Kali, wiped out Ali again, as I also did in London, and then followed it up by beating Ian in a completely awesome game that I wish I'd written down - I made lots of moves of the kind that common sense dictated would eventually go horribly wrong but never did. It was either a moment of inspired genius or the kind of game that would make the othello program wZebra swear at me and call me an idiot. Then I came alarmingly close to losing to Rob but somehow managed not to, to finish with five wins out of seven, and third place half a point behind the Ia(i)ns. Which is really quite cool.

It seems to me that just about every othello competition I ever attend can be summed up as "I beat the winners but lost to Roy and Steve". I need to find a way to stop doing that. Especially the losing-to-Roy-and-Steve part.

It's like Christmas!

Not one, not two, not two-and-a-half, but THREE different and unrelated parcels arrived for me today! From Japan! America! Norfolk! DVDs of my Japanese television exploits, which I'm sure are going to be fun, if slightly incomprehensible since they're in Japanese; some books I ordered from Amazon; and a book of Toby Twirl adventures from my sainted mother (see last week's blog about Bobby Bear for details, if you really want to).

It's probably because, according to the best Google logo ever (go and check it out, quick, while it's still the 21st of May!), today is Pac-Man's birthday! It's Pac-Mas! Not that I'm saying that Pac-Man is generally superior to our Lord Jesus Christ, but I think the presents are better. Let's make this an annual occasion when I get fun things in the post from everyone!

It's hot

Very hot! The kind of weather for gambolling gaily in the fields, although I still have to go to work so I haven't had much gambolling time. Here's what I'm doing for the next couple of weeks - going to Sheffield on Saturday for othello, theoretically doing some memory training on the Sunday and then throughout the bank holiday weekend after it so as not to make a complete fool of myself when I go to Stuttgart the next week to unofficially take part in the South German memory championship (which is technically only open to South Germans). Then, if possible (I haven't checked), I'm taking the train from Stuttgart to Magdeburg that evening and then, all tired and not having done any practice since 2006, competing in the Mental Calculation World Cup the next day. I don't mind making a complete fool of myself there. I do feel a little guilty about possibly taking a place in the competition away from someone who can actually mentally calculate (it's limited to 40 people, and the organisers choose which 40 applicants to accept), but only a little bit. When I come last, it will make the other 39 (barring the inevitable multiple no-shows) feel better about themselves.

Souvenir T-shirts

I'm wearing my World Memory Championship 2003 T-shirt at the moment. It's extremely groovy, but it sets me wondering "when was the last world championship that gave us T-shirts?" Was it 2003? Or did they do that at one or both of the Bahrain ones? I get a shirt every year from the German championship (which is good, because I don't own many shirts and I prefer not to buy clothes if I can possibly avoid it), but you don't often get one at the Worlds.

What I really wish they'd do is give out souvenir trousers at memory competitions. I only own two wearable pairs, and one of those is my work trousers that I couldn't be seen in public in outside of work hours for fear of being thought uncool.