If you remember it wrong, its over. (you keep the money you got and that’s it)
No notes, digital physical or otherwise. You’re only allowed to use your brain.
Starts with 5 words, totally random, then next day it 6 words (the original words from the previous day is kept the same, but adding one new word). Day one prize is $1000, day 2 prize is $2000… (so you have $3000 if you got the first 2 days correct) and so on…
(All currency in USD at current exchange rate)
How much do you think you can get?
I think I max out at like 12 words, then I’d just mess it up.
In my youth I memorised some 50 digits of pi in a similar fashion for fun. Considering 1000 USD i could and should treat it as a full time job I’m guessing a month or so before my laziness gets in the way and I make a mistake.
Do a web search for “mnemonic technique memory linking”. There’s a technique for just this sort of application.
The pay is more than I make in my current job starting on day 1. 100 days would be over 5 million dollars, enough to retire on. I can devote 8 hours per day for 3.5 months for retirement level money memorizing a list of 100 words.
Person woman man camera tv
I forgot the start of this topic title when I arrived at the end so I would say negative 1 day
ADHD moment (me fr)
I think i can get to 40ish words. I mean i have a whole day to focus on remembering the words, and it’s not ridiculously hard since its only 1 additional word per day, while the rest remain the same. It seems if I do make it to 40 words, i would have earned 666,000.00 USD which is pretty amazing. here’s table of the first 10 words:
Day | Cash per day | Number of words | cumulative earned 1 1,000.00 5 1,000.00 2 2,000.00 6 3,000.00 3 3,000.00 7 6,000.00 4 4,000.00 8 10,000.00 5 5,000.00 9 15,000.00 6 6,000.00 10 21,000.00I think I’ll get pretty far. I’ve always been good at memorizing things like this. I think for words I’ll turn it into a song in my head or something.
100s probably. With that level of reward I’d be able to memorize a lot of things.
If you just asked me to repeat a phrase that someone said earlier in the day, I’d have no idea.
But, if I have 24 hours in between, and it’s worth thousands of dollars, I’d make a little song out of it and it’ll probably the only thing that would be in my head all day every day.
I’m a biologist, undergrad was tons of memorizing lists of vaguely related words. Since it’s an additive list and it’s literally the only thing I’d have to do, 100+ at least. 200+ if it forms any sort of coherent sentence. Every day, all I’d be doing is practicing the previous list and learning one new word.
Edit: for giggles, I calculated how much you’d earn at 100 days, then 200. The formula is T= 1000(n(n+1))/2 for anyone who is curious.
At 100 days, you’d have $5,050,000.
At 200, $20,100,000.
For that money I would be repeating the words all day like a mantra in order to not forget them. I want to think I could last at least one month.
Bohemian Rhapsody is nearly 400 words, and I could recite that at any moment.
Currently on day 197.
Whoops.
I’ve said too much.
That’s literally only one word to memorize each day. I can speak comfortably without a break for about thirty minutes, so let’s buy that as a conservative upper bound for speaking without errors. Assuming two seconds per word, that’s 30^2 or 900 days, between 2 and 3 years.
Wait you’re saying that after N days you get N(N+1)/2 total dollars? I think you’re underestimating yourself saying you’d max at 12 words. Doing 1000+ doesn’t seem outlandish. You get a day for each additional word, you can use part of the day to make up mnemonics and so on. Lots of people memorize digits of pi to 100s or 1000s of places and this is kind of similar.
After 1 year you’re at $67K, 2 years $267K, 3 years $600K, and so on. Pretty cushy gig after the first year if you can keep it up.
Edit: that should have all been in K$ as pointed out below. So $67M after the first year.
Your math is off by three orders of magnitude. After one year, you’d have $66.8M.
I bet they did the classic n(n+1)/2 but forgot to multiply by $1000.
Oh lol, yeah I was starting at $1, $2, etc. Ha. Yes I think it is easier than you’re making it out to be. I use random pass phrases for various computer things and don’t have trouble remembering a few of them. I guess the main problem is if you get caught out by long or weird words.
Bruh, 3 years is 1100 words 💀
No way lol, I stuggle to remember things a lot, too much depression and brain fog.
Not as tough as it seems. People routinely memorize much more in shorter periods. Try learning the complete Kanji (Asian Pictograms) or heiroglyphics. It’s not inconceivable to memorize 10,000 random words. Think of how many songs you can recite the lyrics to. I learned Billy Joel’s, “We Didn’t Start the Fire” in a day. That’s pretty much what this challenge is about - a random list of words.
Literally zero people in here could remember 1000 random words in the correct order this way. No one. Most people couldn’t do 10. No one would get close to 50.
Hermann Ebbinghaus has entered the chat. He studied this sort of thing with nonsense syllables. You have to work at it, but yes most people can learn and repeat hundreds of them.
Oh come on, 10 is pretty easy. Here is 10: comply-pone’s-mi’s-NyQuil-Agassi-fowled-should-gabs-tipis-carrel
Try writing them down on a piece of paper, repeat them to yourself once or twice, then see if you can write them on a 2nd piece of paper from memory, referring to the 1st piece as needed, but not just copying. Then do the same with a 3rd piece of paper and so on. You should be able to remember all 10 within a few minutes of that. Then do something else for 30 minutes, then try to write down the phrase again, referring to an earlier paper if you have to.
Would I do that just for giggles? Maybe not. For $1000? Heck yes. I’m sure you could too. Getting to 50 by adding 1 word a day for 1.5 months, no big deal either. Like almost every nerd I memorized some pi digits (I stopped at 50, unlike some) as a kid. I still remember them. Many people I know did 100+ and some I don’t know have done 1000+. In fact the record seems to be above 100,000: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Piphilology
Numbers is a lot different - there are only 10 of them, so only 10 options for each one you have to remember. How many words are there in the english language?
I doubt a single person in here could even get to 30. Think about the intelligence of the average person. Remember that half of the people in the world are dumber than that. Most people can’t even remember a secure 12 character password no matter how hard they try.
The password file I use has 22665 words (it’s actually /usr/share/dict/words filtered to 8 bytes or less). I use random 6 word phrases from it, so 86.8 bits of entropy. One word is about like 4.3 digits in terms of randomness, but it’s easier to remember. For 12 random letters (56.4 bits) simplest approach is make up a sentence starting with those letters and try to remember it. Here:
>>> import string, random >>> ''.join(random.choice(string.ascii_lowercase) for i in range(12)) 'acobjomepaxr'So the 12 random letters are acobjomepaxr. A crusty old bastard jumped on my exquisitely pampered, ancient xenophobic rodent. That took a minute to concoct but it helped the words sink in. If you do that, then write down the sentence a few times like before, you will probably remember it. Think of the 100s of lines of stupid Monty Python dialogue that every nerd of a certain age can recite without even having tried to remember it on purpose. Also see: https://xkcd.com/936 .
When I create a new passphrase (6 words using /dev/urandom), I generally write it down on a slip of paper and carry it in my pocket. That is potentially subject to capture but it’s pretty safe from network attacks. Then when I need to type it in, I try to remember it but refer to the paper if I have to. After a few times, I don’t need the paper any more, so I can drop it into a shredder. I haven’t done this recently, but it’s not a big deal.
Think of the 100s of lines of stupid Monty Python dialogue that every nerd of a certain age can recite without even having tried to remember it on purpose.
That works because they’re real sentences, and sentences have structure and make sense. Reciting a 50 word paragraph from a book/movie word for word is infinitely easier than remembering 50 random words in the correct order.
So the 12 random letters are acobjomepaxr. A crusty old bastard jumped on my exquisitely pampered, ancient xenophobic rodent. That took a minute to concoct but it helped the words sink in.
Again though - you made a real sentence out of a random string of letters. What OP is asking isn’t a real sentence, nor a string of letters that you can use to make your own real sentence.
Nothing stops you from making up a sentence the way I did. You’re shown a string of 12 random letters and you will get $1000 if you can repeat them from memory tomorrow. You can’t make up a weird memorable sentence in a few minutes with $1000 on offer? Idk about you, but most of us could use the extra $1000 and would jump at the chance.
The OP was asking about a passphrase that gets 1 word longer each day. Have you tested yourself at all? You might look up “memory palace” for techniques of doing that sort of thing. 5000 words is impressive, 50 is no big deal at all. Change your Lemmy password to a 5 word random phrase (write it down) and log in a few times a day with it. You will remember it without referring to the paper pretty quickly. Do that 10 times with different phrases and there is your 50.
I don’t know what else to tell you since it’s obviously only answerable empirically, and even given a demonstration you would probably just claim that the person was an unusual freak. I don’t claim that literally everyone could do it (some people are just hopelessly forgetful). But IMHO it’s very doable in general.
Nothing stops you from making up a sentence the way I did. You’re shown a string of 12 random letters and you will get $1000 if you can repeat them from memory tomorrow. You can’t make up a weird memorable sentence in a few minutes with $1000 on offer? Idk about you, but most of us could use the extra $1000 and would jump at the chance.
I just addressed that…
Again though - you made a real sentence out of a random string of letters. What OP is asking isn’t a real sentence, nor a string of letters that you can use to make your own real sentence.
That’s not what OP is asking. OP is saying that every day you’ll get a random word, not a letter. It’s not the next word in a sentence/paragraph - just a random word. You cannot use the same trick of making a sentence using the letters you have to remember as the first letter of each word, because you are being given the words you have to remember.
To believe that most people could remember 50 random words, in the correct order, is absurd. There are plenty of sources saying that the average person can remember less than 10, even when talking about random numbers instead of words. It has been studied for decades, if not over a hundred years by now, and the closest you’ll get to a consensus of the number of words or even numbers people can just remember in their short term memory is … drumroll…7!
https://thebrain.mcgill.ca/flash/capsules/experience_jaune03.html
https://humanbenchmark.com/tests/number-memory
https://glossary.psywellpath.com/exploring-memory-span-how-much-can-we-remember#real-life-examples
https://www.englishclub.com/efl/podcasts/interesting-facts/working-memory/
https://yoursagetip.com/questions/how-many-words-can-the-human-brain-memorize/
https://abcnews.go.com/Technology/brain-memory-magic-number/story?id=9189664
Countless psychological experiments have shown that, on average, the longest sequence a normal person can recall on the fly contains about seven items. This limit, which psychologists dubbed the “magical number seven” when they discovered it in the 1950s, is the typical capacity of what’s called the brain’s working memory.
As a sentence or a string of numbers gets longer, it becomes exponentially harder for the excited cluster to suppress the others from firing, resulting in pathways that are weak or barely there. Recalling seven items requires about 15 times the suppression needed to recall three. Ten items requires inhibitory powers that are 50 times stronger, and 20 or more items would require suppression hundreds of times stronger still. That, Rabinovich explained, is normally not biologically feasible.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Magical_Number_Seven,_Plus_or_Minus_Two
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Memory_span
I doubt there is even a single person here on Lemmy that would be able to get even remotely close to 100 words. Maybe 1 or 2 could hit 50…but highly unlikely.
How much time do we have to memorize it?
like every 24 hours.
day 1 you get 5 words
day 2 (24 hours later) you have to recite it, then if correct, you get $1000, then you get another word
day 3 (24 more hours later) you have to recite the 5 words + 1 word from day before, then if correct, you get another word and you get $2000
and so on…
I mean, how long do we have to look at/hear the new word? Is it just one and done? Or would there be time to memorize/internalize it?
I actually didn’t think too much about it, but I envision it this way:
The word(s) appears on a screen in front of you, a recorded voice plays the pronunciation 3 times, 5 seconds apart, the words stays on the screen for a total of 30 seconds. That’s it, no pausing, no repeat, no photographs or recordings allowed, you have to use your brain only. And the words for previous days do not show up again.
As for reciting, once the 24 hours is up, you get a 60 second window to say or type the words then you can edit or confirm like its a computer text box (it has speech to text). For each additional word, you get 12 second bonus. So you have 120 seconds for 10 words, 180 seconds for 15 words, etc…
The next 24 hours starts after the this window ends, so if you get to 25 words, you have 300 seconds to recite it, therefore, the next 24 hours start 5 minutes after your previous 24 hours end, (the 5 minute window being the time you have to recite the 25 words).
That’s reasonable. Hard to say how far I could get. I think I could 14 or so at least. Could probably get further if I can figure out a good way to memorize them.
