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...

The Friendly Memory Championship 2014, part 6

More numbers...

In the world championship, this makes more sense. There's a 60-minute numbers event, and a five-minute numbers where you get two attempts of which the best one counts. In National Standard competitions like this one, we get a 15-minute numbers and a 5-minute numbers - it's a bit too similar for my liking.

'Speed numbers' is what this discipline was traditionally called, but that kind of name is discouraged nowadays, because it causes confusion with speed cards (in which speed is what counts). But I really think we should follow the old German example and give the disciplines individual names - "5-minute numbers" sounds so sterile. Let's call it the Numbersprint.

I once held the world record for this discipline, with 333. We've had a 50% improvement in the years since then!

The Friendly Memory Championship 2014, part 5

Cards!

Everybody loves memorising playing cards! When the World Memory Championship was first invented, it was done with the knowledge that the two memory-themed world records anyone had heard of were memorising pi to thousands of places, and memorising a shuffled pack of cards amazingly quickly. And in those days, 'amazingly quickly' meant three minutes!

Memory competitions traditionally finish with the speed cards and have a 'marathon' cards discipline somewhere in the middle, although in National Standard competitions, the marathon is only ten minutes long. Ten packs in ten minutes has never been done, but I'm sure it's possible. I used to practice with nine, and it was a challenge, but if I'd spent the last six years doing more training, I might well be up to ten by now. I wonder who'll break that barrier first?

If there's one thing I'm particularly proud of in my memory-contest accomplishments, such as they are, it's the 'Ben System' for cards. The idea of turning two cards into one simple image was unthinkable until I did it, and now it's quite commonplace. But who'll be the first to do three?

The Friendly Memory Championship 2014, part 4

Numbers!

Numbers are really the bread and butter of memory competitions. Apart from the two written and one spoken numbers disciplines in every competition, many people still think of binary and cards as being just numbers presented a slightly different way.

I've personally never found numbers as much fun as cards, I don't know why. Maybe it's the tactile pleasure of shuffling them in your hands? Or maybe decimal numbers are just intrinsically a bit more boring than binary digits?

Anyway, the scores in numbers seem to be escalating at a rate of knots lately - it's not so long ago that 2000 in an hour was still a distant target, but now the top memorisers have left that mark in the dust. And five-minute numbers is rocketing forward even more quickly, with scores of 500 now being recorded. Fifteen-minute numbers, because it's only done at National Standard competitions, is maybe lagging behind a bit, but the days when I held the record for years with just over eight hundred are long gone now...

Numbers have always been a part of the memory championship scene, of course, and the distinctive rule that they come in rows of 40 has been around for as long as anyone can remember - but why 40? It puts people who memorise the numbers in groups of three at a bit of a disadvantage, because that puts 13-and-a-third images on each row. Obviously, when memory competitions started, everyone had a two-digit system, but things have moved on since then. Maybe we should consider changing the rules and giving the numbers in rows of 36? That would accommodate everybody's systems!

The Friendly Memory Championship 2014, part 3

Everyone's favourite (everyone except me, anyway) - Names and Faces!

This has to be the discipline whose rules have changed the most over the years. The scoring, after many, many different versions of rules to penalise guessing, has finally more or less given up on that idea and become simple enough for people to understand, but the rules about what the names should be are still a little bit prone to change, or at least to fluctuations in difficulty from one competition to the next. For the record, they should be 'international' names, representing a random selection from around the entire world, mixed and matched so the first names, surnames and photos don't need to represent the same national or ethnic origin.

I'm not sure if that completely fulfils the requirement of being fair to everyone, but it's certainly better than the names all being English...

Photos, incidentally, will have plain white backgrounds - the selection on this slideshow come from many years ago, when that particular rule wasn't being enforced.

I'm no good at names and faces. I'm famous for it, and it's become my 'thing' now, so I'm clearly never going to get over the mental block. It is of course a 'natural memory' discipline, perhaps the most natural of them all, since it does involve recognising faces, and it's very hard to convert that concept into mental images. If we ever modify the Abstract Images discipline so that it becomes the kind of thing it was originally meant to be, I suppose that might become more 'natural memory', but maybe not.

Most people convert the names into images that they sound like, associate them with the way the face looks, place them on a journey, and so forth, but there's always going to be a lot of vagueness and improvisation involved. That's probably what the N&F experts out there like about it the most! Me, I still can't stand it. Sorry.

The Friendly Memory Championship 2014, part 2

Binary digits!

Memorising binary digits has, again, been part of memory competitions almost since the start, although only as a 30-minute discipline until 2006. It's also always been the rule that they are presented in rows of 30, unlike decimal digits which come in rows of 40, and there's a simple reason for that - everyone always used to memorise them by turning each group of three binary digits into a single decimal number from 0 to 7, and memorising that. It was just another decimal digits task, with an extra step included.

Dominic, apparently not being familiar with how binary numbers work, changed them into decimal numbers in a different way that made sense to him, but still just converted groups of three into a number from 0 to 7. Andi had an anecdote about how he once got half way through recalling before he realised he was writing down decimal numbers instead of ones and zeros. Neither of them were big fans of the whole idea of binary digits in memory competitions.

I think I can take the credit for being the first to do something different, and even then my system is still only subtly changed from that basic principle - even so, binary is something where there's always been a big gap between the best and the rest. And scores have leapt up since people first started doing it; the current world record for 5-minute binary would have comfortably won the first 30-minute binary event, back in 1993.

When I first started out, I wasn't a fan of binary either - I created a really rubbish category-based person-action-person system and persevered with it for much too long, before coming up with an idea that worked. But when I did, binary quickly transmogrified into a great favourite! And I think there's always something cool about being able to say you remember three or four thousand digits of ones and zeros - it's probably the score that sounds the most mind-boggling to the uninitiated!

The Friendly Memory Championship 2014, part 1

There's two weeks to go until the ninth Friendly Memory Championship! I'm going to write a daily series of posts about the ten disciplines you can face at the competition.

We start with Random Words!

Random word memorisation has been part of memory competitions right from the start, but it was always 15 minutes' memorisation time until the shorter alternative National Standard competitions were introduced in 2006. The rule that the words come in columns of 20 has been there for a long time (although I found an old set of rules on the internet that says columns of 25), and nobody's ever suggested it should be any different (although I think some children's competitions have used 10).

The rule about spelling mistakes not losing you the points for the whole column came in a bit later, probably at the suggestion of Dominic O'Brien (who's dyslexic), but also having the advantage of not penalising people too much when there are spelling mistakes in translations (which hopefully doesn't matter so much now that the translators can check their spelling on the internet, but you never know...)

Rules specify that the words should be "generally known", and that most of them should be concrete nouns that you can create a mental picture of easily. Despite the increasingly specific rules over the years, some words events are still easier than others. We try to keep it consistent, though. I've always thought that Germans would be at a disadvantage, since in English a lot of words can be used either as a noun or a verb, allowing a bit more flexibility, while in German they're either one or the other. But German-speakers tend to get much higher scores in words than I do, so what do I know?

But maybe it's just because I do words in a different way from most people? I think a lot of competitors are more rigid than me about how they do it - turning each word into an image and putting a set amount of images on each location on a journey. I've always tended not to use journeys at all, and just make a story out of the words. Although lately I've been more journey-minded, especially in the Extreme Memory Tournament. It's probably better in the events with the shorter time limit.

The world record in five-minute words is 124. The new world record in 15-minute words in the first competition for which results exist (the 1993 world championship) was 125. Can we beat that in a third of the time this year?

Words is one of the 'natural memory' disciplines, as opposed to 'system memory' like cards and numbers. You don't have a finite number of possibilities that you can assign an image to in advance. So there have tended to be people who are naturally better at the words than others - it's an interesting phenomenon that someone should study some time.

Anyone got any words-related anecdotes to share?

Free your mind and the rest will follow

The Mind Sports Olympiad will be happening from August 17-25, and I've decided I'll be going along, for the first time in a good few years! The main reason is that they've decided to resurrect the idea of an MSO Memory Championship, for the first time in a good few years, and I feel I should support that kind of thing. There's even prize money! (I did think about keeping it a secret, so as to have a better chance of winning it, but that wouldn't be very mind-sportsmanlike, would it?)

So I've booked the time off work, let's see what I'll be doing for a week down in London (staying in a student hall of residence, as per the good old tradition).

Wait... that just made me think about how long ago it was that I first went to the MSO. Seventeen years? It surely can't be seventeen years! Good grief, it is.

Right, let's pretend I'm not that old, and get back to the schedule. Events cost £10 entry fee for a half-day competition, £15 for a full day, or you can pay £120 to play as many events as you like. Really, I think it'd be a struggle to amass much more than £120's worth of entries, so it's probably better just to pay for each one individually. I think it was £50 for an all-week-entry-ticket in the first MSO...

Seriously, seventeen years? I know mind sports competitors who weren't even BORN that long ago!

Okay, let's look at the schedule.

Sunday 17 August - looks like Stratego is the pick of the bunch. I've been playing online at the excellent site www.stratego.com for the last week, ever since someone mentioned the game online, so I'm hugely in the mood. I'm no good at it, but winning was never really the point of the MSO, until I discovered memory... The poker games in the evenings are always worth taking part in - the first one is seven-card stud, which I won a gold medal in (by sheer luck) one year.


Monday 18 August - Continuo in the morning, always fun if you're in the right mood, and I'll try Blokus in the afternoon, because learning new games while playing in a tournament is the best way to do it! Then in the evening, we have the Memory World Cup. Good old MSO tradition of calling everything a 'world championship' or as close to that as they can get away with...

I've asked for some clarification of the rules - all we've got at the moment is:

Competitors memorize as much information as possible within a given period of time. The challenges will include the following: 2 rounds of memorizing a deck of cards over 15 minutes. Memorizing a base-10 sequence of numbers over 10 minutes. Memorizing a sequence of binary digits over 20 minutes. Memorizing historic dates over 10 minutes. Memorizing a random list of words over 15 minutes.

Prizes:
◾Gold medal - £200
◾Silver medal - £125
◾Bronze medal - £75


And if it didn't clash with the memory, I'd certainly be playing Exchange Chess in the evening! The hours I spent at school playing that with my chess club gang... ah, the memories.


Tuesday 19 August - Oware! Oh, that takes me back. It was the big hit of the first MSO, with everyone having fun learning the game and giving it a try! I'll be doing that in the morning, and Quoridor in the afternoon - someone showed me that game recently, I guess it must have been at an Othello tournament, but my memory of it is hazy. I think it was in a pub. In the night session, since I've never liked London Lowball all that much, maybe the mental calculation blitz? Or even the backgammon-with-no-doubling-die? I fancy that one, actually, I haven't played backgammon for years and years and years - at the second MSO, it might have been!


Wednesday 20 August - the Mental Calculations World Championship! (As opposed to the World Cup, which is a non-MSO event...) I really should get back in practice with mental calculations, I haven't done any for so many years, apart from a bit of half-hearted participation in the Memoriad. That leaves me with Mastermind in the afternoon, since I don't like the look of "7 Wonders", a self-described 'amazing card game'. And for the evening, Pineapple Hold'Em, possibly the silliest and most fun variant of poker!


On Thursday and Friday I'll be decamping to Romford, for the UK Memory Championship. Unless I decide to skip it and stay at the MSO instead, because there's Acquire, the Decamentathlon, Abalone, Chinese Chess...


Saturday 23 August is a rest day at the MSO, presumably for religious reasons - the venue is JW3, "a Jewish community centre with a kosher restaurant, café and bar – only food bought at JW3 can be eaten on the premises". So I'll have to go elsewhere for my bacon double cheeseburgers and hope my fedora doesn't make me look like I'm mocking the Hasidic tradition...


Sunday 24 August - good old Othello in the morning; introducing me to memory competitions was the best thing the MSO has ever done for me, but introducing me to othello comes a close second. Then in the afternoon we have the unique experience that is the Creative Thinking World Championship (name as many uses as possible that a fish could find for a bicycle...) and an evening of Texas Hold'Em. Classic MSO!


Monday 25 August - And finally, I'll finish off with Boku in the morning (I won the gold medal in that one year, too, but it's been a very long time) and then get back home in time for work the next day. It'll be just like old times. Very old times. Seventeen years? Oy.

Go! Mighty Orbots!

While I'm on the subject, let me present another curiosity from my cartoon video collection...

Never shown on British TV, and mustering only 13 episodes in America in 1984 before it was cancelled, I'd never heard of Mighty Orbots before I stumbled across this video tape a few years ago. And I'm a huge fan of this kind of thing, as I might have mentioned before, so that just shows you how obscure it was. It would be easy to dismiss it as a cheap attempt to cash in on the popularity of Transformers, but it's more than that - for one thing it was created before Transformers became the hit cartoon and the must-have Christmas toy of that year; it's more like the both of them (and Go-Bots, and all the others) were simultaneous attempts to cash in on the popularity of Japanese giant robot cartoons and toys. For another thing it wasn't at all successful at cashing in - judging by the vague rumour and hearsay scattered around the internet, the plan seems to have been to license the Bandai toy Six God Combination God Mars (gotta love those Japanese cartoons and their liberal use of the word 'god'), only to be stopped by a lawsuit from Tonka, who turned out to already own it. And most importantly, Mighty Orbots isn't at all cheap - the artwork and animation are simply gorgeous! Better than Transformers usually mustered, certainly!

Admittedly you don't get that impression from this video cover. A collage of images copied from the episode "The Wish World", which isn't on this tape, we get a big green monster (his name's Plasmus) and a planet being sucked into a whirlwind, both unique to that episode, plus recurring character Dia who only makes one brief cameo in the three episodes in this collection, plus regular characters Bort, Tor and a strangely effeminate-looking Rob (compare this picture with the actual screenshot on the back that it was copied from - this cover isn't the work of my hero Marc, but it's a similar piece of work). Luckily, several episodes are available on YouTube, so you can check it out for yourselves!

This tape is interesting, because from what little I can find on the net, only the first six episodes were available on video in the USA. This British tape has episodes 7-9. Possibly the entire series was released over here, and ignored by Transformers-obsessed 1980s kids? I'd like to find the rest, anyway...

The show chronicles the adventures of dashing space hero Rob and his team of six robots: Ohno, who resembles a small girl of quite excessive cuteness, and Tor, Bort, Bo, Boo and Crunch, who combine into one giant robot called Mighty Orbots. The giant robot's singular name is the same as the name of the team, which is a bit weird. They fight the Shadow Organisation in thirteen entertaining if unoriginal adventures.

The thing that sets Mighty Orbots aside from other cartoons of the time is the narrator - cheerfully commenting on what's happening throughout the story, he's funny and entertaining and it gives the whole show more of a friendly feel. The episodes are mainly written by the same guys who wrote Transformers and many other cartoons of the time, but the 'house style' of Orbots is something I really like, and want to see more of.

We need a DVD, people! Someone release one!

We now return to Force Five (again)

I'm pleased to report that I now own a copy of Birds of Prey, volume 7 of The Formators!

If you're wondering why that's a big deal, you haven't read my old blog post about my Krypton Force collection!

Now all I need for a complete set of UK-released Krypton Force tapes of Force Five cartoons is Orion Quest volume 3, Red Moon. If it exists at all. I've never heard of anybody who owns one - it was registered with the BBFC, and you wouldn't think that even Krypton Force would release a volume 4 and not volume 3, but you never know...

Birds of Prey, meanwhile, is great fun to watch! I'd recommend it to anyone, although it might be difficult for you to find your own copy, so you should probably come round here and watch mine.

How to soften the blow

"Remember the olympic games? Wasn't it cool? By the way, we're putting our prices up."

That's the slightly strange message being put across by my local chip shop...

Get ready for some friendliness!

I don't think I've mentioned this on the blog yet - the Friendly Memory Championship takes place on July 26, at Attenborough Nature Reserve! Come along and meet the memory people! It's a great day for everyone!

It has a Facebook page and a mnemotechnics.org page, which between them should tell you all about it - but anything else you might be wondering, just ask!

Bloody lights have gone out now.

I might have to reconsider moving to Belper six months ago. I did know from working here that the power occasionally goes out if the weather is fierce, but I never considered that it might also affect the Haunted Hotel. Still, it's back on again now, so possibly I'm making too much fuss about the whole thing...

We can try to understand the New York Times' effect on man

A great article including a very nice video about the Extreme Memory Tournament  can be found at the New York Times website. Check it out!

The interesting point it raises is the way I think of people's names if they're unfortunate enough to be among my 2704 mental images. I'll always say Guy Plowman's full name like that if someone puts me on the spot and asks me to describe the images I just used to memorise a pack of cards with no consideration of whether it'll show up in a major newspaper article (he's quite delighted with the publicity, so it's okay), because he's the eight of diamonds and queen of spades, which is a 'Guyp" sound.

Othello players illustrate all the possibilities between them - Geoff Hubbard (2d/8s) is just 'Geoff', and I'd struggle to remember his surname if you surprised me by asking it; Roy Arnold (Kh/2h) is 'Arnold', although I do remember to call him Roy face to face; and Garry Edmead (7d/Ks) is 'Greedy', his internet nickname. It's a confusing business, all in all. I'd remember people's names better if they were cards.

Practice

I've done a 30-minute cards and then 30-minute binary practice today, you know. It must be the first time in a long long while that I've done two "half-marathons" in the same day. The XMT did get me more fired up about memory competitions in general; I'm just hoping I can keep up the enthusiasm until I get past the point of just being pleased that I didn't get so bored with it that I gave up and did something else, and get to the stage of seriously improving my results...

To the Extreme

I've probably said enough about the Extreme Memory Tournament now, but if you're still eager to read more, check out Nelson's summary!

Anyway, it's another long weekend, and just maybe I'll spend the next couple of days memory training. I'm even inclined to create a big database of names and faces and do some practice of that. I just get the feeling that I should do that, for a change. And did you know that you can upload a photo to Google images and it'll give you hundreds of similar images? It's a great way to get lots and lots of background-free head-and-shoulders photos for your training!

The UKXMT

I really want to organise a UK Extreme Memory Tournament. Nelson and Simon are all in favour of having local competitions happen as much as possible; all I need now is for someone to give me really quite a lot of money in order to make it happen. I'm thinking of a three-day extravaganza, with the Friendly Competition in the WMSC style included in there as well.

Could I get 16 British competitors? Actually, probably quite easily, there's a lot more of us now than there used to be. Could I get 32, and expand it to World Cup proportions? I'd want to make it UK-and-Ireland, actually, so I can invite Conor Muldoon and Charlie Garavan. And for that matter, maybe we should add Americans and Australians, too, so that Nelson and Simon can compete? Okay, now it's the English-Speaking Countries Extreme Memory Tournament! If we spread our net any further than that, then those Europeans will just win everything again...

Okay, who's competing? I'm not, since I'm hypothetically running the thing and learning how Simon's software works so that I can keep it going while he's competing, but I'm sure there'd be plenty of interest!

RIP Bob Hoskins

Yes, it really is sad that the star of Who Framed Roger Rabbit has died, it was a completely wonderful movie that I really love, and he was awesome in it. It's just that I'm confused.

See, I'd always had the idea that Bob Hoskins was famous for something else, before he starred in one of the universe's greatest cartoon-human-interaction movies of all time. I was under the general impression that he was a renowned star of other famous movies or something like that, who appeared in that film as a bit of light relief from a serious career in proper films that people who aren't me really thought were great.

So it's a bit strange to see all the news stories describing Bob Hoskins as "the star of Who Framed Roger Rabbit and other movies". Was I just imagining the whole thing? It's true that I always got him mixed up with Phil Collins, so maybe that's what I was thinking of, but then Phil Collins wasn't famous in films before 1988, and I didn't see Buster until a couple of years later... maybe they've got a third twin brother out there too, and that's who I was thinking of?

Continued!

I'm finally home! Here's what I wrote on the train while trying to get here...

Back home, sort of. What with tube strikes and then signal problems at Kettering cancelling all the trains going from St Pancras, getting back from the airport turns out to be a lot more tricky than usual. I'm currently speeding towards Grantham, in the hopes of getting a train to Nottingham and then to Derby and Belper. Still, it gives me time to carry on writing about the Extreme Memory Tournament. The wifi on the train isn't working ("this is caused by a technical fault," the tannoy has just helpfully told us), but eventually I might get somewhere that allows me to post another blog entry, maybe.

Where was I? Oh yes, we'd just finished the quarter-finals. Things were running late (this was a revolutionary and different kind of memory competition in many ways, but not in that way) so the schedule was rejigged - Roddy Roediger's presentation about the study of memory athletes, then a lunch break, then someone else's presentation about identifying the precise bits of a fruit-fly's brain that relate to memory (which included colourful 3D movies of microscopic brains), and then finally back to the competition.

This gave everyone time to think a bit more about the first surprise task (we were only given ten minutes strategizing-time before starting it, so most of the detailed analysis came later), and to conclude that most of the competitors would have been beaten by an opponent who immediately threw his recall papers away and stopped the clock without trying to memorise anything - 81 three-second penalties for a final score of just over four minutes. Anyone who had just memorised the three ten-digit numbers (memory and recall of those could have been done within thirty seconds) would have ended up with a score of three minutes, which would have been the best score of the day. Probably contrary to the spirit of the rules, though...

In the gap between quarters and semis, I was chatting with some of the others, and mentioned that Jonas and I had both guessed the three of hearts in our surprise round. "I guessed the three of hearts, too!" gasped Boris. What are the odds of that? Well, as anyone who's considered a three-card-image system will tell you, the odds are 1 in 140,608. This inspired us to ask the other quarter-finalists what they'd written down. It turned out that most of them had left it blank; the only other person who'd taken a guess was Mark, and he'd written... the three of hearts. 1 in 7,311,616.

This inspired various theories about what nudged everyone's brains in that direction. Hearts was the first option on the recall sheet (you wrote down a number and circled the appropriate suit symbol) and there were a lot of threes floating around at the time - three piles of cards, three sets of numbers, three recall papers of which the missing card was written on the third, three seconds penalty for a mistake - so it perhaps isn't all that surprising. Still cool, though.


Speaking of surprises, the surprise task for the semi-finals related to the presentation we'd just seen - the DNA sequence of one of the strange things they'd done to generations of unfortunate fruit-flies in the name of science, or in other words a long string of the letters A, C, G and T. One point for a correct recall, minus one for incorrect. Again, it wasn't until afterwards that someone came up with the intriguing idea of treating them as binary digits - A being 1, all the others being 0, and only writing down the As. That might have got a much better score than any of the semi-finalists came up with.

As it was, Simon won in his semi-final against Mark Anthony, and Jonas won against Johannes. For the second round, Mark chose numbers, the only one of the four disciplines that Simon hadn't set the highest score in, having tried three fast times but made three mistakes. No mistakes this time, though, and Simon went 2-0 up. Johannes chose words, but lost (just barely) to Jonas - a 2-0 lead for the Swede too.

Simon then picked names, and comfortably moved into a 3-0 lead. Jonas picked names too, and won too, 3-0 to him.

That left Mark to choose, and there were a few mumblings of surprise when he picked cards, against the undisputed world's best card-memoriser. But if you think about it, his only other option was words, at which Simon is also by far the better of the two of them - and in cards, there's a much higher chance of making a mistake and getting a low score. No mistakes here, though, and Simon "the hitman" Reinhard (after reading my previous blog post, James told me that that's a better nickname for him) moved into the final with a second consecutive 4-0 win. Unstoppable.

As for Jonas "the feet of memory" von Essen (he competes barefoot, like some modern-day memory-competition Zola Budd), he was also given cards for the discipline that could take him into the final, but, well, you could practically hear the sound of his brain collapsing under the pressure. Johannes stopped the clock with a respectable time, Jonas took the whole 60 seconds to look at his cards, and then spent the 4-minute recall staring at the screen and being barely able to remember a single one.

That made it 3-1. Then it became 3-2 (words), and then 3-3 (numbers), as Jonas continued to fall a long way short of the kind of scores he'd been producing in the morning. Not that he could have done anything about Johannes's new world record 15.98 seconds in the numbers, though! Jonas had the choice for the final decisive round, and opted for that old favourite, names.

Watching this match was the absolute highlight of the weekend - not for the high standard of recall from two seriously-stressed-out competitors, but for the sheer excitement! Over the course of four minutes' recall, the two of them struggled to fill in names - first one was winning, then the other. Johannes got up to twelve correct names, shook his head, changed one of the correct names to an incorrect one and fell back to eleven points. Jonas got up to ten, remembered that one of the men was called Sidney, wrote that name into two of the blank spaces, moved his cursor to the real Sidney... and didn't write anything. The recall time ran out, the audience collectively exhaled (seriously, I don't think anyone had so much as breathed for at least the last two minutes), and Hannes celebrated a comeback victory, 4-3 to take him to the final!

So my predictions for the final didn't quite work out - Jonas looked pretty devastated, as you can imagine, but he seemed to perk up after some extensive hug-therapy from his girlfriend. A grand final between Simon and Johannes brought back memories of the German TV show where they had to compete against each other for the honour of facing me in the grand final - sadly, the XMT picks its grand finalists based on merit, so that didn't happen here. Florian Dellé, who'd been extensively live-streaming the whole tournament, cheerfully pointed out that seven of his eight predictions for the quarter-final lineup had been correct - I asked who the exception was, and it turned out it was me. Some people have no faith in my powers of fortuitously getting through on a tie-break, it's shocking. But Florian is now proudly sporting a hat and beard, so I can't stay mad at him.


Before we got to the final, there was the important matter of the third/fourth place play-off. Simon and Hannes were locked in the cupboard again, since the final would be using the same surprise task, and everyone else gathered around to watch as Jonas and Mark were presented with their Extreme Memory Task. A truncated chessboard, 5x8, would be placed in front of them, and on each square would be 0, 1, 2 or 3 coins. There were four different kinds of coin (those poor Americans only really have four kinds) and they could be either heads or tails. The competitors had one minute to look at the board, then four minutes to take a pile of coins and place the correct denomination with the correct orientation on the correct square. One point for a completely-right coin, minus one point for any wrong coins placed on the board.

It was a tricky one. I'm still not sure exactly what the best strategy would be - the various permutations are hard to turn into decimal numbers without a lot of unnecessary repetition. Jonas won with a score of 10, but I suspect bigger scores could be achieved with a bit of work and a lot more than ten minutes to prepare.

The surprise tasks were all completely awesome, by the way. I really want to arrange my own Extreme tournament now, just because I've already had ideas for two really great surprise tasks that I want to confront competitors with. The UK Extreme Memory Tournament is a definite possibility, if only I can get the resources to stage it.

Jonas went on to win at names, words and cards without any real difficulty, to take that coveted third place. A great performance all round!

And so to the grand final! This one was best of nine, just to make it even more special, with two extreme tasks. The first was the coins again, and Simon won. He then won cards, with Johannes trying a fast time and not getting it right, then chose names and won that too, for a 3-0 lead.

Then it was time for our final Extreme task, which turned out to be spoken numbers-and-letters. Nelson read out a list of random numbers and letters, at roughly one a second (no recordings here, it was live and extreme), and the competitors had to take turns recalling one at a time, with the first mistake losing, like they do in the US Championship. The first list was ten items, then fifteen, and so on. Only it didn't go so on, because Hannes made a mistake in recalling there. 4-0 to Simon - is he really that much better than the rest of us at extremeness?

Well, we can take comfort in the fact that he's not quite perfect. As the loser of the surprise task, Johannes chose numbers, and Simon stopped the clock at 18.54 seconds, confidently typed them out in the recall, before stopping in confusion when he realised he'd only got 14 images in his head rather than 15 (he's got a super-extreme 4-digit system). The great thing about this competition is that we could all watch on the screen and see exactly what was going through his head as he figured out where the missing image must have come in the sequence, and took a guess at what it might have been. But it wasn't right, and we were 4-1. Comeback on the cards?

Not quite. After suggesting that he should have been able to select names, since they last did it three rounds ago including the surprise round, Simon opted for words, and won it with a confident score of 43. The hitman became the first ever Extreme Memory Champion, and richly deserved it was too - he was a class apart from everyone else all weekend!

I can't wait for the next XMT! Huge thanks to Nelson, Simon O, and everyone else who made it possible!

If only I was 0.35 seconds quicker

It's been a sort of extreme memory-family reunion this weekend - not just with fifteen other memory masters and their families and friends, but a whole pile of American competitors standing by to take part if necessary (it wasn't) and helping out with the organisation, the Washington University in St Louis gang, casino-cheating expert and card wizard Sal, mnemotechnics.org webmaster Josh and two entirely non-memory-related local friends, I've been constantly surrounded by a horde of people I know, some of whom I hadn't seen for ages. But now I'm in San Diego airport, on the way home (the plane's delayed by half an hour, exactly like the one on the way out - it's probably the same plane, and has been running thirty minutes late for months) and need to try to summarise everything that happened at the Extreme Memory Tournament for the benefit of my loyal bloglings.

I hope everyone was following the action on the internet, because that site and all the software really was amazing. Never in the history of "memory sports" have we had the ability to watch everything going on, even from far far away (like in Australia, where Simon Orton was at work non-stop, patching up minor bugs as soon as they arose). Live coverage of which cards the competitors were looking at at any given moment, and the ability to follow along with the excitement as they recalled! You can see the results of every match on there now, if you're interested.

Although Group D was very much the group of death, it did come last alphabetically, meaning I had the opportunity to watch the other three groups have their first match before my turn. Plus, my first match was names, against Simon "the iceman" Reinhard, which I was never going to win, so there was no need to worry about getting off to a worse-than-expected start. It wasn't until the second match, numbers against James "the one who decided that Simon's nickname is 'the iceman'" Paterson that I got off to a worse-than-expected continuation, setting a 'safe', slow-ish time of 25 seconds but not being able to remember one of the images.

When one competitor stops his or her timer, the border around the other competitor's screen turned blue, signifying that they could take the full one minute and concentrate on getting a perfect score - James did just that, and won. It was worrying, because I was significantly more sluggish there in the competition than I had been in training.

I pulled it together against Bat-Erdene in the words, and also got a win against him in numbers later (he went for an extremely fast time and didn't quite get the recall right). But those were the only two of my six matches before lunch that I won, and it really wasn't looking good for me at the half-way point. Simon was crushing everyone in his path except for one slip-up against Bat in numbers, but if I wanted to scrape into second place, I really would have to buck my ideas up in the afternoon.

The hectic pace had made it hard to keep up with what was happening in the other three groups, in between my own matches every half hour, but Jonas was the star of the day, winning everything in group C - the other three places were extremely close together and the tension was running high, as everyone could tell from Boris's loudly-yelled rude word in German when he made a mistake in the numbers against Andi. Group A was seeming pretty easy for Johannes (he got the group of life, or of undeath, or of whatever the best word for the easy group is), with Gunther and Mark Anthony closely matched behind him. Ola and Christian were fending off the challenge of Erwin over in Group B.

After lunch, I was thrown into action against Simon in words, another guaranteed loss - two wins out of seven now. I could afford to take it easy against James in cards, with 45 seconds, but I was disturbingly feeling like that was as fast as I could manage to go, with my mind not being fully up to speed. Three wins out of eight. Six out of twelve was realistically the minimum I needed.

That left names against Bat-Erdene to be a real must-win. Since I tend to regard names as being more of an inevitably-will-lose, that was worrying, but on the other hand, he's not so great at names either, so I did have a chance. And I won, just barely. I cheered "Yes!" quite loudly, before even remembering to shake hands, in all the excitement. Four out of nine. Simon had beaten James in the names, too - I really needed Simon to win his matches against my rivals if I was going to finish second, so that was a relief. That put me into second place, ahead of James on the XMT equivalent of goal difference (% recall).

Numbers against Simon, and he stopped the timer in a super-fast sub-15-seconds time - he had by that point set the best score in three of the four disciplines, just needed numbers to complete the set, and had no reason not to try as fast as he could and not really care if he made a mistake. Luckily for me, he did. Five out of ten.

Words against James. I messed it up, getting everything one place out of sequence and not being able to correct myself in time. Wouldn't have made a difference anyway - he'd scored enough to beat me if I had had the time to correct myself. Five out of eleven, back into third place in the group, all to play for in the final round.

Which was cards against Bat-Erdene, who'd not had a good day and was already out of the running. I stopped the clock on 43 seconds and did manage to recall it correctly, much to my relief. But wait - had Simon messed things up against James? Luckily, not quite. He had gone for a fast time and only got 42 cards right, but that was still just more than James. He was only eight cards away, as Boris and Johannes happily informed me immediately after the match. But no matter! I'd qualified for the second day's competition, just barely, on tie-break, with six wins and six losses!

My opponent in the quarter-final would be the winner of Group C. That was Jonas, who had completely killed his opposition, winning everything except for one late attempt at a super-fast numbers time long after he'd sealed first place in the group and had nothing to lose. Boris had also edged through in second place on tie-break over Andi, but as they say in Germany, a good horse only jumps as high as it has to.

Boris's cousin says that, anyway, on Facebook. I can't promise that everybody in Germany says it.

Ola and Christian qualified from Group B with no real difficulty. Johannes won Group A comfortably, and Mark Anthony prevented a completely European quarter-final lineup by finishing second there.


So the second day started with the first two quarter-finals - me against Jonas, Johannes against Christian. Four Germans and four Miscellaneous in the quarters, but we'd landed in two all-German ties and two all-Misc, so we didn't need to worry about a Teutonic whitewash. The other quarter-finalists were sealed away in a soundproof cupboard so they wouldn't find out what the surprise task was, and we got started.

It turned out to be an interesting challenge - a pack of cards would be split into three piles of seventeen (with the spare card put aside), and beside each pile was a piece of card with a ten-digit number on it. We had to, in this order, look at the first pile of cards, look at the number, recall them on a piece of paper, look at card pile two, look at the second number, recall that, repeat one more time for the third set, and finish. Fastest time wins, but every mistake in recall adds three seconds to your time. Correctly identify the missing card on the final box on the third recall sheet and knock ten seconds off your total time.

I went extremely quickly, more in hope that I could remember such a small amount of information with ease than out of a deliberate strategy. I had a lot of gaps in the cards recall, but I was gratified to see that Jonas was taking much longer, and finished a minute and a half after I did. I just took a guess at the missing card, writing down the three of hearts. First thing that popped into my head.

So then we added up the scores, and yes, I'd won - Jonas, a bit rattled by my speed, had made a fair few mistakes too. I noticed with some amusement that he'd also guessed at the three of hearts. But that made it 1-0 to me! First to four wins it.

From then on we were back to the four disciplines from day one. The loser of the surprise task got to pick which discipline to do next, and after that the choice alternated, with the restriction that you couldn't select either of the disciplines from the previous two matches. Jonas selected names, knowing that it would be an easy win. It was, although my score of 14 wasn't too far behind his 18. Score 1-1.

I chose cards for the next one. I'd woken up feeling a bit more positive about my abilities than when I'd gone to bed, but just to reassure myself further I'd done one practice run of cards, stopping the clock in 24.35 seconds and recalling perfectly. So I knew I could do it. I also knew that Jonas had never done a pack of cards in under 30 seconds. In the quarter-final, I stopped the clock at 28, got it all right, and moved 2-1 ahead.

Jonas chose words. I got a very creditable 37, but he managed 40. 2-2.

Left with a choice of numbers or names in round five, which isn't much of a choice, I went for numbers. I stopped the clock at an extremely fast 19.81 seconds, and had to spend a tense recall period wondering if I'd got the recall all right. It turned out that I had, but it also turned out that Jonas had stopped his own clock at 19.47, so immediately before mine that I hadn't noticed the screen turn blue. And he'd got his recall correct, too. 3-2 to him.

After that, it was a bit of a formality. Naturally he chose names for the next match, and equally naturally, he won. 4-2 and Jonas goes to the semis, but really, I was happy with my performance, I couldn't have done any better - no shame in losing in that way.

Johannes had beaten Christian by an identical score. He not unreasonably pointed out that a surprise task involving lots of picking things up, putting them down and writing is unfair to people with muscular dystrophy or any other kind of physical issues, so perhaps for the future we'll have more exclusively-mental surprises, but it didn't matter in the end.

The other four quarter-finalists were released from captivity and had their own battles. Ola slipped up twice in cards, which should have been his specialist subject, and lost 4-1 to Mark, surprising everyone. Rather less surprising was a flawless 4-0 victory for Simon over Boris. He was just unstoppable. In an interview with a New York Times reporter called Ben (I don't normally remember journalists' names, but this one was quite easy), I predicted that the final would be Simon against Jonas, with Simon to win. I'd been saying that all weekend, and saw no reason to change my predictions now.

(We'll be boarding in ten to fifteen minutes, apparently. I don't think I'm going to finish this marathon blog entry in time. We'll have to say "To Be Continued...", I'm afraid.)