30-minute binary training

General Memory Chat
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Sometimes I will get frustrated that I am not making progress. Usually this happens with digits.
When I feel like I’m not living up to my potential, I tend to start doing 2/locus. I do it because I can move really, really fast because the links are weak. So I can squeeze in , and visualize, an extra 25% over what I can usually do, and then I rely on extremely fast reading to review multiple times, and it’s actually quite effective. With a metronome, I memorized 360 digits in 2 minutes, 2 images per locus, took the metronome out of my ears and read them another 3 times. I got 344 on that run, which was back in December. I did it again with 280 digits and it was the best and clearest recall I’ve ever had. To type those digits back out as quickly as I could have, I’d need to be a better typist! After I do that for a couple days, my 3/locus always seems a tad cleaner when I go back to it. Maybe because I practiced seeing the objects so fast, and now they are coming to mind slightly quicker before being linked. So for me, experimentation like this is helpful for more than one reason.

When I do 50 digit sprint, I always do two per locus because it’s just so fast, you can just place one by the other and move on. Now that PB is at 12.64 seconds and yet I always memorize 3 per locus when doing digits. Why? Honestly it’s just because I don’t have many loci. Just like 350. So when I do 2/locus, I use up 50-60 of them in just 5 minutes. Do 3 digit runs and half of my loci are used for the day already.

But if you saw my blog then you saw that it is haunted by this repeated comment:

“You know 2/locus is faster. Your scores are better. Make more loci.”

But making loci is the most boring part of this entire thing by far. So that’s my opinion there. If I had infinite loci, I’d be doing 2/locus with digits for sure. Yeah, yeah, it’s lazy and pathetic, I know.

Cards are a little bit slower, and I don’t expect to be able to review them like digits, so I’m more comfortable with having strong links with cards and sticking with 3/locus. Hannes’ method was fine, too.

Binary I’m still really in the beginning stages, but for now I’m just doing 3/locus for 150 seconds and reviewing all the digits twice more for 75 seconds.

Spoken digits, I just do three per locus. Just before I flipped to this page I scored 180 for the first time. Now I’m about to try for 200!

3/locus is just what most people do. 4/locus is definitely uncomfortable and would take a lot of work. 2/locus is quick and links will be tenuous unless you are careful. 3/locus is a nice balance. But trust me, you’ll have absolutely no problem figuring out what you like. Just try different things and look at your scores :slight_smile:

It’s fun in the early stages coming from PAO…trying to figure out how to take three random objects and make them interesting and add motion, etc. At first either they’re just sort of sitting there, or else you’re really taking your time. It’s when you make a really cool association, (such as 867 fishcatcher - a fishing pole - let’s say it has a heavy object on its hook and is trying to pull it in, and the line breaks and the fishcatcher whips backward and smacks the next object). That’s what it means to “know” your objects. It’s an extra tool in your arsenal – you can always use it! And that is the thing aside from sheer recognition that makes you faster at using object+object+object. It doesn’t have to be less interesting than PAO, but it probably won’t be quite as interesting until you’ve used the objects a few time. You name the numbers first, but it isn’t until you hit the play button that you know what they can do.

Little off topic there. Does any of that answer your question?

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I love that Alex and I are both shrugging. No one has a clue what’s going on in this thread.

¯\ _ (ツ) _/¯

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It should be easy enough to do that. I’ll send you a private message to clarify the exact functionality.

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Haha, the shrugging… lol

Yeah, that absolutely answers my question. It’s definitely gonna take a lot of experimentation on my part, but it’s really comforting to know you’ve done similar things :slight_smile:

I feel you about the loci. I literally don’t think I’ve added any loci since first starting out with mnemonics, which is dumb because I never have any space to store anything useful… Thanks a lot for your help! I’ll let you know how things go. It might be a while because this new list feels like it’s taking forever :confused:

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From my practice,
I am fastest at linking and placing 2 images/location, but I am more likely to forget locations and I have trouble keeping my accuracy. I used 2 images/location when I first started and stuck with it for a while. I still use 2 images/location for 3Bld edges which is about 6 letter pairs and very fast and short term. I have thought about switching back to 2 images/loci because It would be more feasible to know every single Image pair by heart but I do not even know if that would be a good thing for my speed.

3 images/loci is what I use for most events and I am most likely to forget the last image, but I tend to remember it. It is still comfortable to link with and I have room for improvement. This is what I do for Cards/Digits/Binary

4images/loci is what I used to memorize pi this year and I have tried and failed to switch to this a couple times. It is not very fast for me, but I fits more into a loci and is doable. This slow approach makes it very accurate.

4 images: I have tried but I have always failed to be decent at this.
1 image/loci: I have not tried this at all

On Topic:for Binary I use Memoriad to practice and use a consonant-vowel-consonant system so 10 digits=1 word. I use 3 images/loci so each location is a line. I have also never tried using blocks.

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I could have written almost every word above myself.

So you use a modified Ben system. 1024 images. But for digits you use 2-digit right?

How long have you been practicing with it? How fast are you with it? Do you ever get lost while reading? You gotta tell us everything. There aren’t many ppl using the 10 digit strings and as fast as progress has been with 3x3, I can’t help but be curious given the advantage in 30 minute, which is the WMC event.

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You can read my mind? Great men think alike? Both!?

No. My system groups them as 4-2-4 with 16 consonants and 4 vowels but yes 1024 images. I took my experience from finding images for my letter pair image list of AA-ZZ to pick the letters that would be easy for making this list. I chose [c t n m r f s d b g h l k j w p] and [O E I A]. The first 10 letters are what I use for digits. I think the Ben system groups as 4-3-3 which means twice as many vowel sounds.

Yes, I am still stuck with a 2 digit system for digits. I am having trouble using 10 vowels like the Ben system for words and I have not finished my 1000 list. I want the phonetic coding for the 3 digits to fit in the first syllable of words and my list is still a work in progress. This is probably because I care about digits much more than binary and I am being a bit of a perfectionist about an uncompleted list.

I made the list in September-October which was before I started practicing mnemonics everyday.
I practice Binary at least once a week and my PB for 5 minutes is 810. I set the lines at every 5 digits for memoriad to help reading, but it is better with my own lines on a piece of paper. I do get lost sometimes while reading, but I notice that if I am missing a digit at the end of a row. I have never done a long binary (30/60 min) because I feel like reading them is boring compared to cards/digits. I guess I can say that I had fun making my list because of the easy phonetics and because I was able to use alternate images from my letter pairs and put them into a useful list. I think that’s everything unless there is something else to expound.

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That’s good…but I guess it’s not uncharacteristically good, except for that you don’t enjoy binary as much. It must be taken into account that you would have made a name for yourself already if you had gotten to go to sign up for the USAMC, too.

Still, it’s a virtual guarantee that you’ll be a wiz kid at 30 minutes with a little work. Taking Ben’s strategy, where he “hopes to remember 80% of the images,” and applying it to the 3x3 block method, is devastating. I knew from the start that 3x3 would require a different strategy - a change to attempting to remember all 100%, because even if I remembered exactly 90%, I could wind up with a score of “0” if those errors were evenly spread, with one among each group of ten images. It’ll never happen, but all of the less extreme scenarios leading up to that one are also possible. Whereas I could forget 90% of my images with your method and still score the value of points fully equal to 10% of the attempted score.

These thoughts bring tears to my eyes. So I may never be the world record holder in 30-minute binary, but I can probably learn to live with that.

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Is this closer to what you’re looking for? Let me know what else it needs and I’ll add it. :slight_smile:

A timer that hides them after one minute or something like that?

If you want 3x2 as well, just let me know…

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Great, that’s just what we need. Thanks so much. I’m gong to sync this up with my 2-month schedule for card-pairs starting tomorrow.
I also suggested one way to get some good mileage out of the timer in a PM.

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Got a nice increase in 30 minute binary, too. PB of 2925 up from 2400. And on the same day, 5 minute binary digits PB jumped from 790 all the way to 901, what a day!

But ALeman told me in a pm that his 5 minute PB is already 938!!! I probably won’t be able to pass him up until I am able to memorize 990 digits with the 3x3 method, which sucks.

Also, I want to correct a remark I said above about the slashing of a binary score when objects are missed using the 3x3 method. I didn’t have much experience at all when I wrote it.

I didn’t know that you get 15 points out of 30 if there is only one mistake on a line. Let’s say you missed one image per “line” (group of 3 lines) for 8 “lines” in a row. It’s the worst thing that could happen to you. If you actually missed 90 points per image, you would have 720 points deducted. But if you just filled up the empty spaces with all 1’s, you would hit 3 lines perfectly, bringing the deduction to 630. Then you would get half points on 3/8 lines, bringing the deduction down to a mere 495 on average. That’s much nicer.

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You can always use the IAM software.
file:///C:/Users/PC/code/iam/IAM_memo/training.html