Mental Games

Memory and other mental games

Forget Me Not

There are five events in the U.S. Memory Championships. First, contestants are given 15 minutes to memorize 99 names and faces, and 20 minutes to recall them. Next, the contestants have to memorize an unpublished 50-line poem (this year titled, "The Tapestry of Me") in 15 minutes, followed by a series of random digits, a list of random words, and finally a shuffled deck of playing cards. The best memorizers in the world—who almost all hail from Europe—can memorize a pack of cards in less than a minute. A few have begun to approach the 30-second mark, considered the "four-minute mile of memory."

My own memory abilities extends far beyond remembering where I set down my last beer (now where did I set it), but I'm nowhere near this league. I consider myself to have a good memory as far as numbers are concerned. I can usually recall a pretty fair number of my colleagues phone numbers, and I usually remember a fair number if IP addresses on the machines I work with frequently.

While not exactly a memory puzzle, I do have a problem remembering the number of times the letter 'F' occurs in the passage below.

So read the phrase, count the number of F's, and report your results. This is not a race, but a self test, so report your initial count without viewing the results of others or using some software application to aid in the count. I will provide
my count later.

FINISHED FILES ARE THE RE-
SULT OF YEARS OF SCIENTIF-
IC STUDY COMBINED WITH
THE EXPERIENCE OF YEARS.

(Article discussed - Hat Tip : Slashdot)