I am still very busy and my pause from memorizing Pi will continue for some time more. Recently, however, I did try to remember the digits I already memorized, about a month or so after not having done any memorizing or repetition.

So, do I still remember Pi?

Yes, fairly well. After not having spent a thought on these things for about a month, it was considerably more difficult to remember the words (remember that I am memorizing words, or mnemonics, rather than digits directly), but after some thinking they emerged again, except perhaps about 10 percent of them, which I seemed to have forgotten. So for those I had to look in my notes, and when I saw the mnemonic again I felt “Right! That’s the one” and I could feel that it immediately got quite firmly stuck in my mind again.

So, I am quite satisfied with the method from this point of view too, namely that the percentage lost after a month is not so big, and that it requires very little effort to re-establish lost mnemonics.

Day for any date by mental arithmetic

If you wonder what is happening with my memorization, there will be a pause for a while now. A lot of inspiring things are happening in my life right now, so I have less time for this. But I will continue later on.

After a few days of hard work, today I had to sit down and relax a bit at the computer, so I memorized 100 more digits. The last micro story today was “Autodidact cuts innovative cloth” which took place inside a wedding shop. In its Swedish version it represents the digits 70291 32765.

I have added a cool thing to the menu, “Listen to my blog”, try it! It’s not my voice though . There is also a link at the top-right corner of this post, click on it to listen to this particular post.

As you see below, I have extended the date-axis in the graph to February, in order to accommodate for the lower pace now.

I memorized some more digits tonight. It was two weeks since last time. Yes, it is going a bit slow now.

Is it getting more difficult? No, it is just that I have much more to do in my work right now. But 100 new digits now and then is OK

Today I memorized 40 new mnemonics, or 100 digits.

The thing I wrote about a couple of posts ago, about having a computer create the micro stories by selecting suitable mnemonics, is something one could do to some extent already with computers and programming of today, especially if one combines it with some input from the human.

As I wrote before I am already assisted by a computer program that I made. It is equipped with a dictionary and for each group of 5 digits it shows me all possible mnemonics, categorized into nouns, verbs, and adjectives.

I just realized that I had missed a part of a street when I extended the walk a while ago, and now I inserted 10 extra stations there. So my walk now accomodates 100 more digits.

Another 100 digits done. When I memorze 100 digits I spend most of the time inventing the 10 micro stories. When that is done, I have in a way already memorized them, but I would guess that if the stories were given to me “ready made” it would go pretty quick to memorize them. Now I spend about 30 minutes to create them, but if they were given to me I guess I would need only 10 minutes to memorize them, 1 minute per story. In the future, if computers get more powerful and can be programmed to be a bit creative, then the computer can do the job of creating the stories and I would only have to memorize them. This could reduce the time considerably for the whole memorization process, which would then only involve the memorization as such.

Today I memorized 100 more digits. I have a lot to do these days, so I don’t progress so quickly now. Anyway, I have now passed the magical border of one third of the journey. Now I just have to do all this two more times

Here is the updated diagram:

I have now extended the walk quite some bit, more precisely up to 450 stations. It now goes from station 0 up to station 449. So all in all it can accommodate 4,500 digits, which is almost half of the digits I want to memorize. So the walk needs to get a bit more than twice as big, but that I will work on a little later, probably when I get closer to filling up what I have now.

Click here to see how the actual walk looks like right now.