No, I’m not talking about the computer store that I used to work at. I’m talking about the annual U.S. Memory Championship, held in New York on Saturday. I wish my memory was half as good as these guys. (Wired News Link).
The three-day international event pits mnemonic experts from around the globe in competitions that include memorizing a previously unpublished and non-rhyming lengthy poem in 15 minutes, and writing it down complete with proper spelling and punctuation; memorizing a list of 400 random words and reciting them back in order; and the dreaded “binary competition,” in which competitors have a half hour to memorize a random string of thousands of 1s and 0s.