We’ve just added an International option for Names. Give it a try if you want a challenge!
2 Likes
We’ve had a suggestion that the International names should be weighted such that names found more commonly in the real world appear more often.
We originally created the International names by combining all the names from all the languages available on Memory League. This produces a large list and every name has an equal chance of being chosen.
With the weighting approach, names from more populous countries would appear more often, and common names would appear more often than rare names. This would more accurately reflect meeting 30 people chosen at random from the world’s population.
Of course, if we’re trying to accurately reflect the world’s population, 20% of the names should be Chinese, with another 20% being Indian.
What are your thoughts?
2 Likes
I agree to the idea of weighted international names. Do you know if actual competitions also do weighted international names?
1 Like
I like how this let’s you train for real-world scenarios rather than just competitions. What’s the point if you can score high on paper, but can’t apply it for practical purposes… meetings, fairs, etc.
The summary of the 2007 survey revealed China had approximately 92,881,000 Wangs (7.25% of the general population), 92,074,000 Lis (7.19%), and 87,502,000 Zhangs (6.83%). These top three surnames alone accounted for more people than Indonesia, the fourth most populous country in the world.[11]
Detailed numbers for the other surnames were not released, but it was noted that seven others – Liu, Chen, Yang, Huang, Zhao, Wu, and Zhou – were each shared by more than 20 million Chinese and twelve more – Xu, Sun, Ma, Zhu, Hu, Guo, He, Gao, Lin, Luo, Zheng, and Liang – were each shared by more than 10 million. All together, the top hundred surnames accounted for 84.77% of China’s population.[5][12]
By way of comparison, the 2000 census found the most common surname in the United States – Smith – had fewer than 2.4 million occurrences and made up only 0.84% of the general population. The top 100 surnames accounted for only 16.4% of the US population,[2] and reaching 89.8% of the US population required more than 150,000 surnames.[3]
They don’t… in fact, in order to get the full points you have to remember exactly if it was “Christoph”, “Christophe”, “Christopher”, “Kristof”, etc… occasionally, even with fancy "y"s instead of "i"s and things like that. For last names “Larson”, “Larsen”, etc.
Basically, if you spell Famke Janssen either Jansen or Janson… no points for you. Which is better than minus points of course, which you’d get for completely wrong and not just phonetically wrong.
I think that the current approach works fine.
I don’t think that it should reflect the real world since memory league is a competitive software, it just needs to be fair, not realistic.
Besides, we can make sure that we have an equal number of names in each language.
That’s just my opinion.
Thank you for asking Simon
1 Like
Interesting - however, Memory League only has first names, not surnames.
All the languages except International do have a weighted distribution of names, so it’s more like the real-world scenario of meeting 30 random people from countries that speak that language.
I think there are pros and cons to weighting the names.
On the positive side, weighted names are more like the real-world scenario of meeting random people. And I think weighted names would probably be easier than unweighted names, leading to higher scores.
On the negative side, it seems unfair that people from countries with lots of people get plenty of familiar names, and people from small countries don’t. Also, competitors may learn a list of the most frequent names, allowing them to fill in gaps more easily, changing the nature of the event.
3 Likes
Ohhhhh, so this is where the international comes from.
I would say that weighted names is unfair to people outside more populated countries.
Interesting feature, I like it.