Amazing. How long did it take you before you were getting down to about one second per date?
How long? Probably 2 years to go from 15 to 60 dates. In MCWC 2010 I did 14 and 16 dates per minute (D1M) in the official competition. That’s 1 correct answer every 4 seconds. Then, in that summer I reached around 30 D1M in training (around 1 every 2 seconds). My breakththrough was during summer of 2012, I trained for 3 months broke 30 D1M (28-Jul-12) , 40D1M,(8-Aug-12), and 50D1M (3-Sep-12), and reached 55D1M, before MCWC12. But in there I did 36 D1M, because pen and paper is slower than typing. 1 month before Memoriad '12, I finally broke 60 D1M (24-Oct-12) , which means less than 1 calendar date per second, and went to Turkey with a training record of 64 D1M. But it’s hard to reach your best scores in the offical competition, because the keyboard was not mine, and also due to extra pressure of the competition, and the fact that the winner would get 1500$ and free Germany flight, Gold medal, more fame etc… So, in 5 trials I did 42, 47, 44, 41, and 46, which was 44 on average for all my 5 official trials. 44 is around 1.35" seconds per date, consistently, but I had definitely broken the 1 second barrier in training, so it could be better. 41 seems a lot, but considering I’ve done 64 in home, 41 is like choking.
During early 2013, I broken 65D1M and 70D1M in Feb. 2013. In October 2013 I finally broke 80D1M. (82D1M). During 2014 my record was the same:
82D1M on computer and 70D1M writing on paper (0,1,2,3,4,5,6 for the respective date). But before that, you need to practice Fast writing of random digits. I have written on paper, in my maximum speed, 156 legible random arabic numeral digits in 1 minute in order to practice pen/paper speed for the world cup. So, then writing 60 or 70 numbers per minute seems okay compared to 156. But in MCWC I underscored a bit, I did 52 officially… honestly there are many arithmeric tasks to think about , so I was not fully focused on calenders that day, but still, a 5th place is good, considering that there were so many Indian prodigy-children in Dresden. At least Yusnier, Jan and the Mongolian winner(Tuurul) did not participated last time, which made the competition easier for the rest of us
About training. it’s gradual process. Let’s say you train 30 minutes a day. In 2 years, you just need 365 training hours only. (not 10K hours as they claim for expertise) But important to make this task as a spaced repetition. You just can’t arrange it in 12 hours per day for 30 days (360 hours)…It won’t work. It’s much better to devote 0.5 hours x720 days. During training you can also listen to music if this does not distracts you. After a while, it’s like playing the piano… but instead of sounds, correct answers appear. It’s a reward mechanism, if you solve it correct, you feel good and want to go faster. It’s like sprint. When you jog, you feel good, but when you run fast you feel much more adrenaline flowing.
But I don’t think I’ll practice much more, because 90 and 100D1M is pretty much a barrier. If I’ll keep up with 80, that’s okay. I can do more than 100, but only for short sprint outbursts, like
12 correct in 6.8" (rate 105 D1M)
http://i.imgur.com/AmyC70r.jpg
or 16 correct in 9.5": (that’s a rate of 100 D1M.)
http://i.imgur.com/gHI26J8.jpg
But 9.5" seconds is not the whole minute. It’s very hard to speed-solve for the whole minute like that. To do 100 dates per minute you need to process 800 digits per 60 seconds,(since 1 date has 8 digits and 2 dashes;
like today: " 15-06-2015" ) and even if I can do it mentally, then my typing speed may be slowing me down. You have to able to read 14 digits per second, but thankfully the first 2 digits of each year "19xx’s, 20xx’s
after a while are skipped automatically. When I read 1900, I don’t think of 19, but of ‘3’.(the century code). The algorithm you use has to be deeprooted in your brain if you wanna be fast.
Well it’s not the typing skill itself that sets a barrier to go beyond 100 per minute, but the transfer from my visual cortex to see the digits, then to frontal cortex to decide the answer and then to the motor cortex in order to move the fingers. Such a thing takes at least 0.3"-0.5", regardless of technique, doomsday, codes, or any memory recall. However there are about 3-4 people in the world (Yusnier and Tuurul (confirmed) and probably Jan or Granth) that have the ability to go faster than 100. But after some point, let it be 82, 90, 100, 110, 130 calendar dates per minute, everyone reaches his physical visual processing limit.
So, the calendar WR by Yusnier is unfortunately stuck at 93 D1M in the last 5 years. (650 milliseconds per date) The Mongolian guy(Tuurul) tried to broke Yusnier record in Turkey, in order to get an extra 500$, but he did not make it, even though he could do 108 on training. Official record attempts are much different than traning, because only 10 attempts-trials are allowing by Ralf and the alternative records comittee. Hopefully, that calendar record it’ll be broken next year.
Many people will ask why I am trying to do this task so fast? Just for party tricks and for ditching personal calendar agendas+calendar apps to the bin? Not only that. Well, it’s the same answer as sudoku, puzzles or speed-cubing. It does not serve a special survival mechanism, but it keeps the brain active. Also, by reading numbers rapidly, you can improve your speed-reading skills, I personally read much faster than few years go. So, retrospectively, I think learning this skill fluently, offered me some transferrable analytic qualities, like faster processing.
Nodas
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Great info. Thanks for the tips. I guess I would be pretty happy to get it down to four seconds per date. 
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Now the WR is 111 dates in a minute, again, by Yusnier Viera
And Jan Van Koningsveld had 96 dates in a minute before
Yusnier seems to use the method he shows in youtube, and in another method he explains that he likes the method because there are two centuries where you don’t add anything (1600’s and 2000’s)
But performing W=((D+M+C+YY+(YY/4) ÷7) in half second…
Jan van Koningsveld wrote a book explaining, but I’m not sure how is his method (I don’t have his book)
I can perform 12-14 dates in a minute (a date in five secs) knowing only 10 yearcodes
But by speedreading and knowing those 100 yearcodes by heart can take you to those answers.
I just can’t memorize those 100 numbers because of the pattern it shows
(0123560134…) for that I use shortcuts
According to the ludism page, it is faster to know those 100 numbers
All I know is that I don’t know XD
It might be easier to calculate those numbers.
Here is the formula:
Take the year of the century and do an integer division by 4.
With that I mean divide the year by 4 and discard the remainder.
1 becomes 0, 4 becomes 1, 7 becomes 1 and 8 becomes 2, etc.
Add to that the year itself.
Do the result of the addition modulo 7.
Here are the numbers for the first 10 years;
0 0 0 0
0 1 1 1
0 2 2 2
0 3 3 3
1 4 5 5
1 5 6 6
1 6 7 0
1 7 8 1
2 8 10 3
2 9 11 4
2 10 12 5
Here is how to understand this. The year divided by 4 is the amount of leap years starting from year 0. Add this to the year and do a modulo 7 to get the difference in weekdays compared to year 0.
It takes some time to get quick at this and there are shortcuts to make this a lot faster, but this is the way to produce that pattern.
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I also can do 20 dates in less than 10 seconds, in short bursts, therefore 2 correct dates per second. (screenshot). But not for the whole minute. If I would, I then would have 120+ D1M. But my unofficial score in training is now 100 D1M, so about 0.6" per date. An Indian kid “Jay Jain” did 103 correct, this weekend in the Open Turkish National Memoriad 2016. The official WR is 111 D1M by Yusnier and it’s very hard to read and let alone simultaneously solving dates around that 105 and 110 speed barrier. (around 15 digits read/solved per second). “Full focus” is enough to describe this task.
As you go faster, you have to realise that you have to make shortcuts. That includes memorizing 501+366
4-digit blocks and their respective associations.
But to memorise the whole 8-digit block for each date, you need pure recall of all the days within the 501 years (1600-2100) therefore 182,987 days. (146,097 repeating every 4 hundred years + plus a few more ~37K dates for another extra century ). But OK. Let’s be honest in this forum. No human can associate 183K dates with a mod7 number. So, working with 501 + 366 and 4-digit blocks is much easier.
Well, there is still a CALCULATION part left, and that is a simple single digit addition “Modulo 7”. Addition is always calculation.
Overall, in these 600 milliseconds I need per date, I would crudely say that the result is
A. 20% reaction time, then
B. 30% memory recall (of the association),
C, 30% calculation (Addition mod7)
D. and finally another 20% for answer/ output (e.g pressing the button or writing the answer digit mod7)
P.S - Actually, Yusnier’s unofficial record is 137 D1M , therefore around 438 milliseconds per date, or around 55 milliseconds per digit.
- Nodas
Calendar 3rd Place,
MCWC 2016
Hi everyone,
I wanted to share with you an iPhone app for calendar date calculation that I uploaded to the App Store last month. Last year we had this as an extra discipline at the Indonesia Memory Championship and I found the practice I did for it with Excel sheets rather frustrating. Here the links:
- Facebook: Redirecting...
- App Store: https://appsto.re/us/hI1cjb.i
It started as a simple practice App and then I decided to add a dynamic tutorial to it that explains the calculation steps based on the last date you’ve answered, so that people not familiar with it could also start using it. The algorithm in the tutorial shows the year code calculation using multiples of 12 and then progressing leap year by leap year. The rest is as always, get the codes, add them, mod seven, and done.
Nothing wrong with calculating the year and the people I’ve introduced to this method get to 4-5 dates a minute, so 10-15 seconds per date. Not sure if you can get to 10 D1M like this and I myself use memory palaces for the years (see also FB link above). If you already have a PAO System for 00-99 it’d be a good idea to place two objects per location and use persons for the leap years only, this way you can also save yourself that additional leap year check along the way.
Just an idea for the palaces: I use my home for 0) Sunday, then the office for 1) Monday, 2) Tu-es-day (“tu es” in German is “(just) do it”) is the local gym due to the obvious company slogan in the name. 
and so on. Also nice in a way to have your PAO system associated with default locations… in a way you can practice two things at the same time. Then when you see a year you just recall where that object is usually placed and the palace the location is in gives you the code for the year.
I’m at under 4 seconds per date at the moment. Then from here it’s what Nodas said above “it’s gradual process”… I know that I unconsciously take shortcuts by looking at all four components together and if two cancel out I add them first. For example, the 27th of some month and century is 19 (code 1) is 28, drop total, month+year done. Equally, January (6) and century is 19 for 7, drop total, day+year done. So I don’t follow a strict calculation order of century, year, month, and day but whatever is easiest to add by canceling out early as multiples of seven.
Personally, I think I still want to get to 30 D1M because I haven’t really gone to any limits getting to 15+ so double of that should be doable with a little bit of effort before the end of the year. But just like speed cards, there’s getting to under two minutes for IGM title and then there is the world records on a whole different level.
Anyway, check out the FB page for the year codes list that can be used in memory palaces and if you’re on iPhone, I’d appreciate any feedback of course if any of you’d like to try the app.
thanks,
Bjoern
ps: much earlier in the thread was a question about impressing people without it looking like you are calculating. Simple, here it’s perceived time. Just interrupt them at any time and fake confirm that they said “September” or say “so, 1984 you said” meanwhile you can keep going in your head and this way it will look faster in front of the audience. I guess magicians would call it “misdirection”.
Josh,
Are you still interested in calendar calculation?
I have condensed a system to find day of week that will fit on a 3x5 card .
I used observations and mnemnonics techniques to formulate it.
Sure, if it fits on a 3x5 card, it should fit in a forum post.
Let me amend my previous message.
The numbers will fit on a 3x5 card.
The explantion and backround require a multipage word doc.
Once understood it can be memorized or looked up on the card.
I’ve used a combination of previously known systems but wanted
to condense it enough that it was easily memorized.
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Feel free to post it in a new thread if you want. A single post here can hold about 10 pages worth of text, and you can make multiple posts in a thread. Send me a message if you have trouble with it.
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Does this site have any instructions for a post?
My content is in word doc with pictures.
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You could export it to HTML and then copy/paste it into a forum post. (It will automatically upload the images from your clipboard if you paste them.) Or upload the Word doc to Google Docs and link to the Google Doc.
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Doomsday method created by John Conway. Explained here https://youtu.be/714LTMNJy5M
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How many dates per minute do you average with that? I always found that quite a slow method to get the answer and prefer:
- century code
- year code (w/o formula)
- month code
- day
- sum and mod7
…adjust by -1 in case of a leap year + Jan/Feb for the month. Seven memory palaces for the year codes and done. You can easily get a beginner with 00-99 images already set up, down to 4-6 seconds per date (10-15 per minute) after they set up the seven year code palaces; so let’s say after a week of training.
I average about 30 dates per minute with that method on the normal 1600 - 2100 range used in competitions… a bit slower when going all the way up to 9999.
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Think I finally got it figured out. Here is link to google doc for explanation.
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…so what does the 3x5 card look like? Is it included in the doc?
It’s a generic description of a 3inch x 5inch card used for note taking.
I used it as a reference to size. It could also be reduced to a business card
size if your eye-site allows.
I didn’t mean what a 3x5 looks like physically… I meant what information do you want to put on it… like you mentioned before:
What I meant was that the main table /with clock face could be shown on a ( 3 in x 5 in) card or piece
of paper. Everything (all the numbers) you needed to determine d.o.w. could be in one neat little place.
The red brackets on the picture are just as explanation. Having done that, it was easy to memorize
all the required numbers by use of major system,mnemonics, and memory palaces. So the basic
task was distilled into a simple math operation. After practice I could get my time down to about
5 seconds from memory. However, it was never my goal for speed, only to be able to do it
mentally.
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