Finwings training journal: Combining memory sports and knowledge learning

[Finwing]

Hi there,

thanks for reading my training journal, I appreciate it. Feel free to ask everything. If you are interested we could also train together or race for a training goal. Don’t hesitate to challenge me

I wasn’t very active in the past months, so there is much to do. Fortunately I have more time now.

• The first goal for the near future is to re-learn my three digit major system. Most of the numbers bigger than 200 are either too slow or completely forgotten. I plan to add and train 20 images a day. This should be finished by the end of August, fluency probably needs way longer.

• The second goal is to memorize book contents each day. Usually I convert the informations into imaginary journeys that I then use as palaces for memory sports. This is different from the common Method of Loci that makes use of real or virtual locations. The big advantage is that I can combine memory sports with knowledge repetition. I’m really curious if I could compete with the fastest memory athletes out there using this approach.

• Last but not least I will try to train at Memory League on a daily basis, at least one round in each of the five disciplines. Yesterday I played for the first time in weeks and right away got a new personal record: 30 words in one minute. Yay!

Updates on my progress are planned for every 2 to 4 weeks at most (as I don’t want to annoy forum users that aren’t interested in my journal).

See you

[Finwing]

Gosh, more than a year has passed already. It’s time to blow away the dust and revive this thread. Shockingly the goals are still the same. I wonder how this can be

Anyway, in the past few weeks I’ve reworked my 3-digit system in order to make the images more vivid and memorable. Many of them were still from the time when I started with memory training.

I’ve also updated the memory palace that holds all 1000 images so that I can look them up if necessary. It consists of ten bigger areas, each having ten distinct sub-areas. A sub-area can be a room, a shop or a corner of a garden for example. Ten number images are stored in each sub-area, nine of them clockwise (or counter-clockwise), the last one in the middle.
When I forget the image for number 483 for instance, I just have to jump to area 4, sub-area 8, then look what is in the back left corner.

Back when I created my 3-digit system, I also made a shape image for every number. So what I’m using is basically a Major System, but combined with the number-shape system extended to three digits. For instance the word for 50 is lasso, as 5 = l and 0 = s. But you can also see the image in the shape of the number: The 0 is the loop of the lasso, and the 5 is the winding rest of the rope. See this thread for more informations on the Shaper System.

Initially I planned to skip updating the shape images too and rely on the memory palace only. But this turned out to be a bad idea. At the three-hundreds already I looked at the numbers and didn’t know what they meant in most cases, even after several days of training with flash cards. Adding number shapes really makes it easier to recognize the images, so that’s what I’m working on right now.

I’ve also re-designed the journeys that I’m using for Memory League games. The stations come in groups of five now. Although this rule is mainly meant to improve long term memorization, I guess there are also some minor benefits for memory sports. At least it’s easier now to figure out the number of the location, and it hopefully prevents shifting errors too.

That’s it for now.

The next step aside from finishing the number shapes will be to install a routine for daily practice. Ten to twelve rounds a day on Memory League should be enough to ensure steady improvement. I think I’ll start with Images, Words and maybe International Names because they need no preparation aside from journeys. Numbers will follow as soon as I’ve finished training all the 3-digit images. The same applies for Names and Cards as I intend to create a 2-card system as well as images for the most common names.

Just for documentation purposes (because I hope to break some of them within the next weeks or months), here are my current personal records on Memory League:

Thanks for reading! See you

[Finwing]

Yeah, finally a new record. My personal best in Words improved from 37 to 39:

Seems that I’m starting to get a hang of my new systems and journeys

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By the end of January I started to practice my reworked 3-digit system. (It’s basically a combination of Major system and number shape system.)

The first step was to recognize a number shape when I saw the number as well as the solution. This was the easy part. I added hundred numbers a day, so this was finished after around eight days.

The second step was to find the image when I just saw the number. In the first two or three weeks I had to look up most of them in my number palace, which took five to ten seconds for each query. Way too long for Memory League games. It was really frustrating. But at some point I started to recognize more and more number shapes without searching the palace.

I’m using a simple shell program to train the number system. It’s an adaptation of a vocabulary trainer that I’ve written when I was younger. I didn’t know about mnemonics and spaced repetition back then.
First the program reads the numbers and the solutions from a text file (actually a LaTeX file). Then it shows a random number at a time, plus the solution after I’ve pressed the enter key.

A helpful trick was not to just look at a single number at a time, but try to link two consecutive numbers into a vivid image or a short story. For example when I recognized an image as a cake, and the next one as an elephant, I tried to create a funny picture with these two images. I think this helped me a lot.

A pitfall that I encountered was that the font on Memory League is different from the default font in the shell. For instance this is how 906 looked in the shell:

And this is how it looks in ML:

Pay attention to 6 and 9. This actually made it difficult for me to recognize some number shapes. @Erol I think this could also be interesting for the Shaper system.

Fortunately I found a way to install a font similar to the one used on ML so I could also train those shapes.

The Memory League World Tour is already a full success for me. It motivated me to properly learn my 3-digit system. Thanks a lot to all organizers for this!

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I also finished work on my 2-card system, but didn’t start to practice it yet. It will use just 676 images, which are also part of my 3-digit system, plus spatial information. More on that in a later post.

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What’s the next step aside from training the 2-card system? Well, I figured out that my recognition times are still very bad, for my 3-digit system as well as my 1-card system. I need around one second for a card and 1.5 to 2 seconds for a number. I think that’s the main reason why I’m so weak in the system disciplines. Definitely have to work on that.

That’s it for now. See you later, and thanks for reading

[Finwing]

Oh nooo! The thread is covered with dust all over again

I really have to make a habit of posting more regularly. Maybe once a month? I’m doing a backup of the files on my computer at the end of each month anyway. That would be a good opportunity to also recall and evaluate the last thirty days.

There isn’t too much to report though. I stopped practice shortly after the last post because other things in my life needed attention.
Nonetheless I’m happy to announce that I’ve refreshed a big part of my routes and systems in the past few weeks and also did some training games on Memory League. Once I even got a score of 39 in Words. Images are fine too already. I’m on my way back to good shape!

My plan for the next weeks is to finally install a regular practice routine. I’ve reduced the number of loci stations that I use for Memory League from roughly 2400 to 1700. That amount should be easier to maintain, and I think it’s probably enough to survive any championship (just in case).

See you at the end of February, and thanks for reading.

[Finwing]

Hello everybody, long time no see

Unfortunately I wasn’t able to continue practice back in the day because there were other things to do. But now I’m back. Hopefully.

This time I’ll start rather small. The goal for the next few weeks is to train my number system, to the point that I can use it for Memory League Numbers again. I’ve reworked it a few times in the meanwhile, hence part of the images need to be re-learned.

God, I’m already at revision number 86! Meaning the system has changed eightyfive times over the years. But I think this will be the final version. Maybe there are still some better images, but there shouldn’t be tooo much difference in quality. It probably isn’t worth the effort anymore to do another revision.

Two more words about the system:

• In the past it was a combination of Major system and Shaper system. I’ll abandon the shapes though. Too much work to adopt them since a lot of images have changed. (Sorry, Erol )

• In the past few revisions I’ve preferred good images over strict phonetic matches. For instance let’s say the phonetic match is the word rails. Instead of visualizing rails on the ground, I took a look at things that are associated with rails. In this case I chose Doc Brown’s time-travel locomotive from the movie Back to the Future 3. It’s cooler than simple rails, and you can do more freaky things with it.

So while the word is still rails, the actual image is a locomotive. I did something like this with a lot of images.

See you next time. I’ll try to give an update about my training every Sunday, but no promise

[Finwing]

Hey, I actually managed to write a follow up post one week later, just as planned!

In the past days I started to train my number system again. I’m using a simple progam for this purpose. It first shows a number between 0 and 999, then the image for that number. This is the amount of repetitions that I did:

Tuesday 200
Wednesday 200
Sunday 200

Six hundred repetitions in total. At this pace it would probably take months instead of weeks to become familiar with the reworked system. Or even longer. But at least it’s a start.

And yes, I changed some images again, around forty of them. That makes number system version 87. Is this ever going to stop? Most of the changes were only in appearance though. For examle one image was a spooky ghost. You know, the kind that consists of a bed sheet Now it’s a Boo from the Super Mario franchise. I actually like that one a lot. It’s cute.

Speaking of video games. In the past some of my memory palaces were real world locations, others were journeys that I completely made up in my head. This time I plan to shift away from both and instead use game maps.

Somehow I stumbled over a cute little game called Leaf it Alone. The map is just a garden with a handful of locations, like a shed, a greenhouse and an empty pool. It’s autumn, everything is covered in leaves, and the goal for the player is to clean the leaves up. (It takes around two hours to finish everything.) Here are some screen shots:

The game seems great to test the concept of virtual memory palaces. The map is small but beautiful, with enough variation to use it as a memory palace. I’m curious how this will work out.

[Finwing]

Just a short update today.

I did 500 number system repetitions on Wednesday. That makes a total of 1100.

Turned out that my recognition rate is abysmal. I’ve forgotten almost all number system images. That’s sad when you consider that I even played Memory League matches with them some time ago.

Anyway, I’ve updated my memory palace that contains all the number system images. From now on I’ll look up the image in the palace whenever I don’t recognize it. Hopefully this will help to learn them faster. Sometimes it’s already enough to roughly know the location in order to recognize the number.

Aside from that I’ve made a journey of 30 locations in the game map from Leaf it Alone.

I’m not the biggest fan of Microsoft Windows, but it has a convenient built-in tool for screenshots. You just have to press Windows key + Alt + Print. It then saves a picture of the active window in the directory %USERPROFILE%\Videos\Captures. You can read more about this feature here.

The screenshots are in png format and take a lot of storage space unfortunately, around 2-3 MB per shot. Luckily there’s a free tool named ImageMagick that can edit several image files at once. It’s a shell tool, so you have to open the Windows PowerShell. Use the cd command to move into the directory with the screenshots. For example when you have put them into a directory ‘Leaf_it_Alone_Screenshots’ on the desktop, cd Desktop\Leaf_it_Alone_Screenshots\ should work.

The command to convert the png files into jpeg files is magick *.png image.jpg. The new photos are almost as good as the original ones, but much smaller in size. You can also change image scale, for example to 1600x900: magick *.png[1600x900] image.jpg In my case storage space decreased from 81 megabyte to just 12 megabyte. The new files are in the same directory as the original ones, so you can delete the latter there.

As a side note, I love to zip directories containing images and change the file extension from .zip to .cbz. Then you can open that file with a comic book program, for example YAC Reader. View your memory journey like a comic book But that’s just personal preference.

Thirty locations are enough for one, two or three games of Memory League Images, depending on the number of images per location. I’ll stick with two for now, so two games. A first test today was so-so.

First game: 12 correct images in 26.47
Second game: 24 correct images in 26.32

The times weren’t that bad actually, but I clearly need to work on accuracy.

[Finwing]

Another week, another journal entry!

This time I was more ambitious with number system repetitions.
Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, Friday and Saturday: 1000 each
Sunday: 900

5900 this week, plus 1100 previously. That makes a total of 7000 repetitions.

I’m starting to recognize some numbers on sight, but they are still the minority. What helps at this point is to mentally look at the neighbouring numbers and try to remember one of these. For instance when I’m trying to find the image for 817, I skim through 810 to 819. With some luck there’s a hit, and usually the desired image comes into mind too. That’s way faster than finding it in the memory palace alone.

On Monday it took me more than two hours to retrieve thousand number images. Now I’m down to around 60-70 minutes. This means one image needs roughly four seconds on average. That’s good for everyday use, but bad for memory sports. I’ll try to keep doing thousand repetitions a day. The goal for now is to reach an average recognition time of one second.

I think there’s also some interesting insight regarding video game maps. Remember the two journeys I made in the game Leaf it Alone? Here are the practice results for the first three days:

Monday
12 in 26.47
24 in 26.32

Tuesday
17 in 25.45
28 in 26.37

Wednesday
24 in 27.73
30 in 26.93

When you pay close attention, you’ll notice that the score for the first journey is always worse than the score for the second one. By far. From above the journeys look like this:

I think I figured out the reason for this effect. Take a look at the start of the first journey (in red):

The first location is in the shed (1), the second one is an area behind a little fence (2). A ladder leads to the shed’s roof (3). Standing there in the game, I looked around and saw another interesting location, a little well (4).

The problem presumably was that this needs a full U-turn. Furthermore, the next few locations were zig-zaging quite a bit. I rearranged the journey to make it smoother:

It now starts with the well. Pay attention to the transition between 3 and 4. I teleport from the roof directly into the shed. That may feel unnatural, but it eliminates the U-turn. The following locations are reworked too. Here’s a comparison between old and new:

The full journeys, revised:

And here are the practice results with the reworked version:

Thursday
28 in 22.68
26 in 22.37

Friday
28 in 20.93
28 in 20.59

Saturday
18 in 20.33
26 in 20.98

Sunday
22 in 20.83
25 in 20.35

As you can see, the journeys are mostly equal now. The takeaway: It seems to be more important that transitions are smooth, rather than natural. I have to keep this in mind when making more game journeys.

[Finwing]

Hello again

Let’s start as usual with the number system repetitions
9400 this week + 7000 previously = 16.400 total

This means every number showed up around sixteen times now. Not enough for instant recognition in a lot of cases. Four days ago I started to track average recognition time as well. It’s down to roughly three seconds:

One game of Memory League Numbers consists of 27 numbers. With a recognition time of three seconds I would need around eighty seconds just to find the images. That’s too much! The goal for now is to reach an average time of one second per image.

Speaking of Images. I’ve played two games daily for two weeks now with the map from Leaf it Alone.

The times are mostly around twenty seconds, scores are between twenty and twenty five. I’m really struggling with swaps, meaning there are two images on a location and I don’t get the order right at recall. Back in the day I had a strict one-image-per-location policy. Guess my brain needs more time and practice to adapt. Having said that, I’m rather pleased with this test run so far. The game journeys seem to be as good as real world journeys. I think it’s time to create more of them.

There are some criteria I would like a game map to meet when it comes to memory sports:

• The map is open, but not too big.
• There should be unique points of interest. The more the better.
• There are at least some walkable buildings with interior.
• The game is preferably in first person.

Turned out it’s actually not so easy to find such games. Or maybe I was looking in the wrong places. Anyway, here’s my shortlist:

• Everbody’s Gone to the Rapture
• Postal 4
• Thief Simulator

The latest Hitman games look interesting too. But as far as I can tell, they are strictly third person. Hence I will stick with the other three games for now.

Thief Simulator has around thirty distinct houses. Similar to the one in Leaf me Alone, but with interiors. They could be quite suitable for Memory League games. I will take a closer look at those houses in the next days. Luckily there’s an invisibility cheat available, so you don’t have to bother too much with actual gameplay.

The other two games feature open maps with lots of locations, both outdoor and indoor. Maybe I’ll save them for classic memory competitions

By the way, if you don’t want to see my journal posts week after week, there’s an option to hide them. It’s at the end of the thread:

You can just set the option to Muted, and the thread is gone from the feed on the main page.

See you next week! And if not, thanks for reading this far!

[waverider]

Will tune into your writing finwing. Just wondering - when you are doing these virtual memory palaces, are you changing position? So from this vantage point here, are you looking at 1-5, or are you moving between 1 to 5 and each has a different / distinct vantage point? So you are looking at it face on?

How are you going with 2 images per location? Why did you change from 2 images to 1? Was it once you reached a certain speed?

[Goldfish (John L)]

There is a VR mode for Hitman, but I’ve found the default third-person to be no issue. For the USA memory championship last year I used the Paris level to store the long-term information and it went really well. Lots of points of interest, and if you know the game intimately there are many many many meaningful loci. I’ve also found Escape Simulator excellent for creating memory palaces or exploring others’ creations. Following your progress, keep it up!

[Finwing]

Hi Waverider, thanks for stopping by, much appreciated!

The screenshot was just supposed to give an overview on the first few locations of that journey. I’m always jumping between positions. Let’s assume the first six images to memorize look like this:

The first two images go into the well. This is how it looks like in my mind:

Of course my mental image of the surrounding is less detailed and rather blurry. Usually I also try to make a connection between the two images. There is a church in the well, and the squirrel is climbing onto its tower.

The object in the two hands looks like a fan. It blows the letters away.

There’s some delicious food on top of the shed. A pot of tea and a dish of meat.

At the moment I’m still struggling with swaps. Okay, there’s that food on the shed. But was the tea pot on the left side and the meat on the right side? Or was it the other way round? Then I end up with something like this:

But I want to stick with two images per location because it’s around thirty percent faster. I actually did a test game some days ago with just one image on every location. It took thirty seconds instead of twenty without improving the score.

[Finwing]

Hi John, nice to meet you

I think I’ve read somewhere that you reached the fourth place in the US memory championship last year? You are really strong!

By long term information you mean the It’s Been a Long Time event where you have to memorize approximately 4000 informations, right? And you stored everything in just one level? That’s impressive.

Thanks for the game recommendations! Guess I will take a closer look at Hitman too.

[Goldfish (John L)]

yep, that’s me! i journaled my whole process, so if you’d ever like to compare benchmarks after X months or whatever you can do it here, i think my rate of improvement was honestly not very special, i just sat down and got a little better every day: Zero to USAMC in 7.0? (months) - John L's Training Journal . Looking back, I think the most interesting thing is how much i struggled with words at first, and as i slowly took away over-configured parts from it and let my brain latch on more to what’s immediately memorable i started to skyrocket; words is now my best event by a mile and i’ve started to see that effect on numbers too as i get away from strict person-action-whatever. with numbers i just XXX XXX a set of 6 digits (using 000-999) and immediately get two words, giving myself the freedom to do whatever immediately comes to mind as an image/concept for them.

Here’s my post about the hitman map. much like you’ve discovered with Leaf, i think, having a route you know through the stations and not having to guess where to go next is what’s critical: Have you ever used CS2 maps as memory palaces? - #6 by Goldfish

[waverider]

That makes a lot of sense and I am very curious to play with imaginary memory palace or virtual memory palaces. I dont play any games so have no layouts to play with.

I have been plodding along with one image per location, and gotten 30 images in most of my recent games, in a lightning fast 60 seconds hehehe. No issues with swaps there :).

[Finwing]

Hello everybody!

More than a month has passed since I restarted this journal. Wish there was more progress since then

Number system repetitions:
7000 this week + 16.400 previously = 23.400 total

Good news is that after three weeks of intense practice, I’m approaching two seconds average recognition time. Here’s the chart for the past eleven days:

As far as I remember, it took me around six weeks to reach one second back in the day. 1.5 seconds should be enough to play Numbers on Memory League though. Forty seconds for image recognition, plus twenty seconds to place stuff on the journey like in Images.

Regarding Images, my scores have improved slightly, but swaps are still happening a lot. Please allow me to show you one of this week’s highlights:

Almost got this one right. Well, maybe it isn’t that bad actually to have come this far after three weeks with only two games a day. But I desperately need more journeys to do more daily practice.

Speaking of which, I took a look at the first map in Thief Simulator. To be honest, it isn’t overwhelming in terms of memory journeys. Hence I switched to another game from the shortlist, Everbody’s Gone to the Rapture. And what shall I say, the map is gorgeous!

I made 25 stations yesterday and another 35 today, for a total of 60 new locations. Enough to play another four rounds of Images every day. Woohoo! I’m already in love with this game

The only downside is the slow walking speed. It could take a while to explore the whole map and make locations everywhere. But I think it’ll be totally worth it.

Another two or three weeks, and I can hopefully go into full practice mode

[Zellion]

ooooo

could this be a preview of a certain post in the works???

(not trying to rush you, just thought it was funny)