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Mats Bergsten is a genius

rahulkadukar

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I don't know if many of you know this, but Mats Bergsten is a WR holder in Pi memorization, and not in the normal kind but there is a different type of Pi memorization.

Everest Test
This involves splitting the first 10,000 digits of Pi into groups of 5, making 2000 groups. In the test 50 groups are randomly read out, and the contestant has to say from memory which 5 numbers precede and succeed each of them. Mats is one of only 4 people in the world who can do this and at 17 mins and 39 secs he is the fastest.

I just wanted to confirm if this is the same Mats Bergsten. If yes then hats off to you sir :D
 

MatsBergsten

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There's no two groups that are the same? (ie there isn't two different times 17492 appears)

Yes, there are some 24 groups or so (among the first 2000 (i.e 10000 decimals)).
At the test you could in that case choose either of the groups.
(The other WR was to juggle simultaneously as reciting decimals, but there are many
better jugglers in the cubing community, look at Mikes one handed bld solve while
juggling with the other, that's juggling :))

As to the silly statement of geniality it is just that, silly. I have a rather good memory
and am rather fluent with numbers. But cubing (blindfolded) is so much more fun than
reciting pi decimals. Fantastic memory is what I call Villes and Arons (and Daniel and Zane
and Tim and.....).

What I am a little proud of as to bld-cubing is keeping pace with almost all of you
at the age of 61 (soon) while I at the same time is four to five times as slow at speedsolving.

So, all in all, always fun that someone notices the pi efforts (I spent much time at learning
a lot of decimals), but geniality is something else.

edit: still, thanks Rahul :)
 
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Ordos_Koala

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There's no two groups that are the same? (ie there isn't two different times 17492 appears)

well, it could be, but Pi is very much random sequence of nubmers so there are 100000 possible combinations in every of these groups... so when you have 2000 of them, i guess it's 1:50... maybe i made somewhere mistake (, but i think if it would be, they'd told him if it was the "first 17492" or "second 17492" :D -> sry, didn't know Mats already commented :/ but still, guess that my math isn't wrong :D)
 
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qqwref

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I think "geniality" usually refers to being nice, but I could be wrong.

The pi memorization thing is pretty impressive for sure, but I think it wouldn't be right to call someone a genius for that. Raw memory and intelligence are somewhat related, but when talking about someone who has spent many years practicing memory sports and digit memorization, it's pretty clear that their memorization skills are due to amazing dedication and practice rather than incredibly high natural intelligence.
 

MatsBergsten

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Mats, i'm curious, if you learn it mechanicaly, then you repeat it all over again whole day, or if you have mnemonic for it?

While learning pi decimals i thought memo techniques (like mnemonics) was a little like cheating,
as it then was the memory that was the main (or only) thing. So I just stuffed them in, five at a time.

While using memo for blindsolving, memo is not the end but just a means of the solving, so
here I use memo techniques (letter pairs and images and a little of rooms).
 

cmhardw

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Mats I have a question about when they call the groups. Do the groups always start at a digit number that is a multiple of 5? For example:

3.14159 26535 89793 23846 26433

Could they ask you to identify the bolded group of numbers: 53589 and to give the five digits both before and after this group? Or would they only ask for you a group like the underlined group above? Either way this feat is very impressive, but I'm curious to the rules they use when calling a group of 5 digits to the memorizer.
 
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