X is interested in the storage capacity of the human brain. It's probably unknown as to the ultimate capacity of the brain, but this April question is about something really possible.
Say you had 100,000 people from all 50 states, all adult age groups, all cultural backgrounds, all economic backgrounds, and they all had IQs of at least 100. Given a study period of 8 hours, how many digits of pi would
each person be able to recite from memory? Say there was a really good prize for each person in the top 1% of reciters.
How many digits of pi do you think people in the winning 1% group could recite?
- Overall champion __________ digits
- Average of the 1% group__________digits
- Lowest score in the 1% group__________digits
Briefly, how did you decide on your answers?
Put your answers in a comment at the bottom of this post.
7 comments:
The champ could recite 2400 digits. How did I figure this out? I studied for 1/10 of an hour, and I nailed 30 digits. Extrapolating for 8 hours, I calculate 2400.
Uncle Eddie says Goerke is full of hot air... the champs number would probably be closer to 800. The first 30 would come to him pretty easy, but after that the learning process would slow down as he would not only learn new digits he would have to rehash the first 30. Each new block of 30 would be compounded by all the previous 30's. Avg 1% would be 700, low 1% would be 600.
I think Uncle Eddie is right on the bull's eye. I'm goin' with his numbers.
I tried the 1/10 of an hour and remembered twelve. Then, in the next tenth of an hour, I upped it to 15. That's about the limit for me. Extrapolating isn't a good idea, but I think there are some pills you can take.
The record for memorizing Pi was achieved by Chao Lu (China) who recited Pi from memory to 67,890 places, at the Northwest A&F University, Shaanxi province, China, on 20 November 2005. Chao Lu, a chemistry student, attempted the record after practicing for 4 years. What does that tell you?
Chao Lu's record doesn't tell us too much about the 100,000 samples. But, it gives a clue to the real question...max capacity of the mind.
The real big deal about the human brain is its ability to "process", not store and retrieve data. I'm working on a model of the brain that shows what its "operating system" must be like.
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