I was doing some research on counting cards and memory and came across this story from 2010 in Esquire relating to several who were using (unnamed) memory methods to perform better on The Price is Right game show. If nothing else, it’s a fascinating example of applied memory methods in modern culture.
Has anyone else played around in these areas?
Perhaps, although personally I would say it is an example of us humans being really really good at ‘Pattern Recognition’ -probably for very sound evolutionary reasons. Your whole tribe gets eaten by sabre toothed bunnies then you learn to recognise the signs of an impending attack.
If anything that very interesting but horribly confusingly written article (remind me not to subscribe to Esquire if all their articles are written like that) highlights the inherent ‘problem’ with any game or Game Show. Ask any regular viewer, especially the old Grannies, and they tend to have an instinctive sense or deja vue for what is going to be behind Door Number Three. Games have to have rules and rules mean repetition, mean patterns.
Back when I was a kid there was a Game Show which got canned after a couple of series because the riddles that the contestants had to solve were , supposedly, just too ‘difficult’ and they were indeed complex-far too complex for me as a child to understand…even if I had been a bright kid and I wasn’t. BUT after watching most of the first series, avidly, I knew instinctively which riddle WASN’T the top prize,the NEW CAR, and which might well conceal the booby prize.
Anyways thank you for an interesting half hour read this Sunday morn .
Circling back to this a few years later… I just watched the documentary Perfect Bid: The Contestant who Knew Too Much (2017) which follows the story of Theodore Slauson from the article. Apparently he had spent a significant amount of time watching/taping the show and documenting the prices.
The documentary provides a single example of Slauson using a visual mnemonic for remembering the price of one item. The majority of his method seemed to be the fact that he put his pricing lists into a self-made spaced repetition system which he practiced with extensively. For some of his earliest visits to the show he mentions that a friend who travelled with him quizzed him on items on his price list on the way to the show. This, likely combined with an above average natural memory, allowed him to beat TPIR.
Outside of the scant memory portion portrayed, it was a reasonably entertaining watch.
Reminds me of Michael Larson, an ice cream truck driver who memorized the patterns used on the Press Your Luck game board (a show that he used to watch in between deliveries) and won $110,237, trips to the Bahamas, Kauai and a sailboat in a single night back in 1984.