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BGonline.org Forums
Memorizing backgammon positions
Posted By: Timothy Chow In Response To: Memorizing backgammon positions (Christian Munk-Christensen)
Date: Monday, 4 July 2016, at 9:38 p.m.
At minimum, it seems to me that Stick's claim that it would be "easily" doable is pure rhetoric. If it were easy, wouldn't a couple of grand be enough?
Let me say a bit more about where I'm coming from. I occasionally engage in moderate memory tasks just for the fun of it, e.g., memorizing all the world capitals (about 200) or memorizing the full text of one of the shorter books of the Bible. What I've found is that it's relatively easy to perform at a 95% or even a 99% level, but 100% mastery is very difficult, especially if one wishes to retain the information permanently. It is quite common for people who have not actually attempted a memory feat to delude themselves into thinking that it is easier than it really is, since (as I said) near-perfect performance is deceptively easy to achieve.
One of the chief difficulties is that the way the human mind works, the errors tend to be surprisingly difficult to eradicate. For example, in the Bible-book case, one troublesome issue is remembering when the text says "Christ Jesus" and when it says "Jesus Christ." There may be only a dozen occurrences but relying on one's "natural" memory is very risky here. If on your first attempt, you make an error, your natural inclination will be to make the error again, and if you tell yourself to do the opposite of what comes naturally—well, you can see what kinds of circularity and uncertainty can result. It's much safer to develop an explicit mnemonic and train on that. For any specific issue like this, it's not too hard to come up with a method to address it, but as the task gets bigger, these types of things tend to pile up rather quickly.
The analogous thing in backgammon would be some plays that are very close or tied. One's "natural" backgammon intuition can go only so far; at some point one simply has to find an explicit technique to remember it. Again, any particular play is not difficult; it's the accumulation of nearly "random" data that becomes troublesome.
I still believe that people who train specifically on memory tasks would do better than Stick on a 100%-performance test such as the one I outlined. But since Stick is asking for more money than I'm willing to put up, it will have to remain pure speculation.
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