If you remember it wrong, its over. (you keep the money you got and that’s it)
No notes, digital physical or otherwise. You’re only allowed to use your brain.
Starts with 5 words, totally random, then next day it 6 words (the original words from the previous day is kept the same, but adding one new word). Day one prize is $1000, day 2 prize is $2000… (so you have $3000 if you got the first 2 days correct) and so on…
(All currency in USD at current exchange rate)
How much do you think you can get?
I think I max out at like 12 words, then I’d just mess it up.
In my youth I memorised some 50 digits of pi in a similar fashion for fun. Considering 1000 USD i could and should treat it as a full time job I’m guessing a month or so before my laziness gets in the way and I make a mistake.
Person woman man camera tv
Person woman man camera tv cockroach
I’m a biologist, undergrad was tons of memorizing lists of vaguely related words. Since it’s an additive list and it’s literally the only thing I’d have to do, 100+ at least. 200+ if it forms any sort of coherent sentence. Every day, all I’d be doing is practicing the previous list and learning one new word.
Edit: for giggles, I calculated how much you’d earn at 100 days, then 200. The formula is T= 1000(n(n+1))/2 for anyone who is curious.
At 100 days, you’d have $5,050,000.
At 200, $20,100,000.
Honestly? I’m failing day one. Took me until my mid-twenties just to memorise the order of months.
Lmao English be funny.
You know how other languages order the months?
一月 (Month 1)
二月 (Month 2)
三月 (Month 3)
…
💀
Also who the fuck invented July and August? They should get stabbed.
I think i can get to 40ish words. I mean i have a whole day to focus on remembering the words, and it’s not ridiculously hard since its only 1 additional word per day, while the rest remain the same. It seems if I do make it to 40 words, i would have earned 666,000.00 USD which is pretty amazing. here’s table of the first 10 words:
Day | Cash per day | Number of words | cumulative earned 1 1,000.00 5 1,000.00 2 2,000.00 6 3,000.00 3 3,000.00 7 6,000.00 4 4,000.00 8 10,000.00 5 5,000.00 9 15,000.00 6 6,000.00 10 21,000.00I’m genuinely not sure, but if it is literally just one additional word per day on top of the previous words that don’t change… I’ve memorized a length 35+ randomly generated password (with special characters) out of spite just a year ago. I think I will do fine in this game, at least for 20-30 days. My memory might not handle anything more than that
Especially since… if my calculations are correct, doing this game for 29 days consecutively would net you $435K, an amount so large that it is larger than the median wealth in the country with the highest median wealth currently in the world ($413,193/adult in 2024); another few days would get you over the average ($498,290/adult) as well. So there is a pretty strong incentive to just do this full time and really give you all
Fun fact, when I was in middle school in China (not sure if they do it anymore) we were expected to memorize whole ancient Chinese poems and literary critiques written by the likes of Lu Xun… with like a month each. They actually appear on the exams and we were supposed to just know the entire poems cover to cover. Which is about the difficulty of this challenge with way less rewards
I think funnier ways to do this would include progressively introducing weirder words (old English or borrowed words from other languages like rendezvous or schnitzel), roll a dice on how many words are added (jackpot: now remember 30 more words at once!), make you only have 5 minutes to remember and then keep going on a live show, etc… These would make a fun reality TV show actually
This made me remember the same on middle school in America. Recite a poem we had been discussing and analyzing all week. It was maybe 60 to 100 words long and we had a week(introduce Monday and recite next Monday)
Fun fact, when I was in middle school in China (not sure if they do it anymore) we were expected to memorize whole ancient Chinese poems and literary critiques written by the likes of Lu Xun… with like a month each. They actually appear on the exams and we were supposed to just know the entire poems cover to cover. Which is about the difficulty of this challenge with way less rewards
💀 They made me recite a random story from those student handbooks/textbooks. (I forgot whatbit was by now)
And they start teaching the 9x9 time table, and we had to memorize it. I still have it deeply engrained in memory. Every times I do multiplication, that song/poem thing gets conjured and its somehow always in mandarin, I can never recite it in Cantonese (because they teach it in mandain of course).
But that took a whole school year I think, one word a day would be tough, I’ve forgotten a master password once.
I can’t even remember the title of this post.
But did you died?
If you just asked me to repeat a phrase that someone said earlier in the day, I’d have no idea.
But, if I have 24 hours in between, and it’s worth thousands of dollars, I’d make a little song out of it and it’ll probably the only thing that would be in my head all day every day.
As it sounds like there’s no risk involved (ie, if I get 5 days right and then the 6th one wrong, I still keep all the money from the 5 days), I think I could probably do this for at least 10 days and probably more. Which would work out at $55k, I think? Not too bad.
For anyone wondering, I think you’d have to keep going for 141 days to get to a million. Keep it up for a year and you’d win $66,795,000.
A billion would take 1414 days (3.87 years), and to pass Musk’s current total (480.1b, according to a quick search) you’d need to keep getting it right for… longer than I’m willing spend time on to make my spreadsheet calculate. I’m sure there a formula to work it out, but I’ll leave that to someone else :-)
I have a terrible memory, but for the money you’re giving, I would invest a decent amount of time into reciting this over and over for hours and make it into a game the best I can. Considering the potential of this making all my financial issues go away, it seems like a very easy solution.
I am very unsure. With your example, I think I could go for awhile, those particular words are pretty sticky, I could chant them mentally, make a tune & sing them. And I’d be motivated, first day it’s already it’s already more than I make at work, right? So this is the new job? I would try for a month, a cool half million would certainly fix our budget even after taxes.
Correct horse, battery staple
What I don’t know is whether I could avoid cheating - if my kids heard me singing these they would pick it up and they have wicked good memories. They would be chanting it the next day. And if I couldn’t say them out loud it would make it more difficult. So might be immediately DQ’d.
Currently on day 197.
Whoops.
I’ve said too much.
I’d give it about a week before my cryptolalia betrays me.
Memorizing the first 5 words would be the hardest, after that any mnemonic technique would allow you to keep going for a LONG time since it’s essentially memorizing one word a day.
How much time do we have to memorize it?
like every 24 hours.
day 1 you get 5 words
day 2 (24 hours later) you have to recite it, then if correct, you get $1000, then you get another word
day 3 (24 more hours later) you have to recite the 5 words + 1 word from day before, then if correct, you get another word and you get $2000
and so on…
I mean, how long do we have to look at/hear the new word? Is it just one and done? Or would there be time to memorize/internalize it?
I actually didn’t think too much about it, but I envision it this way:
The word(s) appears on a screen in front of you, a recorded voice plays the pronunciation 3 times, 5 seconds apart, the words stays on the screen for a total of 30 seconds. That’s it, no pausing, no repeat, no photographs or recordings allowed, you have to use your brain only. And the words for previous days do not show up again.
As for reciting, once the 24 hours is up, you get a 60 second window to say or type the words then you can edit or confirm like its a computer text box (it has speech to text). For each additional word, you get 12 second bonus. So you have 120 seconds for 10 words, 180 seconds for 15 words, etc…
The next 24 hours starts after the this window ends, so if you get to 25 words, you have 300 seconds to recite it, therefore, the next 24 hours start 5 minutes after your previous 24 hours end, (the 5 minute window being the time you have to recite the 25 words).
That’s reasonable. Hard to say how far I could get. I think I could 14 or so at least. Could probably get further if I can figure out a good way to memorize them.
