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If Socrates were alive today, he'd encourage engineers to internalise the spigot algorithm
Then, like a MENTAT, they'd be able to tell you the 16afedf97fd4th digit of pi when prod
In hex, naturally https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bailey%E2%80%93Borwein%E2%80%9...
I have a huge respect for Fabrice Bellard for creating his own optimized version:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bellard's_formula
Moonwalking with Einstein is a fun read. I started using some tricks in real life. One of the key premises is that humans are much better at remembering sensory things than abstract ones.
A good example is remembering names: when one’s name is “John Baker”, it is so much easier to remember by silently adding “the” in front of it.
We’re also very good at remembering salacious stuff. I tried constructing my own memory palace for a grocery shopping list that included cream cheese. If you mentally make Claudia Schiffer take a bath in cream cheese, you’ll never forget that. (I read the book at least 10 years ago and still haven’t…)
In 1999 when I was about 12, I memorized 120 digits of pi with little issue. I had some extra motivation: once I got to 20-30 digits, a classmate bet me I couldn't get past 100, and he'd give me $1 for every digit I memorized past 100. Never saw my $20 :(. Pretty sure it was a well-executed nerd-snipe.
Having not practiced at all since about 2001 or so, I can still get to about 30 pretty easily. I didn't use any techniques specifically, I just kept practicing as far as I remember.
A chapter on memorising numbers from he book The Memory Book: The Classic Guide to Improving Your Memory by Harry Lorayne and Jerry Lucas uses a similar technique. They recommend memorising this mapping:
0: 's'
1: 't'
2: 'n'
3: 'm'
4: 'r'
5: 'l'
6: 'sh'
7: 'k'
8: 'v'
9: 'p/b'
To use it, just make images/stories that correspond to the digits you need to remember.
The more absurd the story, the less likely you'll forget.
E.g. pi (3.14159265359 ) could be the images of these objects: mit, rat, lab, Noah, shell, mail, bee. Then just sew them together in a story e.g. someone drops a mit, it lands on a rat, the rat runs up to someone in a lab, it's Noah, he throws a shell, it knocks over some mail which lands on a bee.
I don't use it often, but I like to memorise any 8+ digit door code when checking into a serviced apartment or airbnb, in case I forget my phone and would otherwise be without the code.
Funny, I just finished that book.
They were using a few more mappings per number for instance:
0: 's', 'z', soft 'c'
1: 't', 'd', 'th'
6: 'j', 'sh', 'ch', soft 'g'
etc
The problem I have, is that they present them from 1 to 0, and the first 4 have some mnemonic logic added to them: a bar in 't' for 1, two bars down in the 'n' for 2, three in 'm' for 3, and the 'r' from fouR in 4.
Great. And then mnemonic logic goes out the door. 5: 'l'. Ah. A single bar. Err.. is it 1 or 5..? 7: 'k'. Imagine the K looks like a 7. Ok, maybe.
So the mapping itself starts getting confusing. Unless you do what they claimed all along the book you shouldn't do: rote memorization.. Which was grinding my gears a bit..
Learning an entire Mozart sonata is probably easier. How much engineering there is in the memorizing or in the composition I don't know, a lot?
A lot of professional musicians memorize tons of music habitually. It's not very hard to be completely honest.
Mozart only wrote like 20 piano sonatas and about the same number of violin sonatas. It's no exaggeration to say that most concert pianists or violinists probably know at least 5 of them just as a matter of course because they will have learned them at some point in their musical education and someone who specialised in the classical period would probably know all of them. My wife learns tons of repertoire when she's performing as most of her concerts are completely from memory and this includes a vast range of repertoire from the middle ages through very complex 20th/21st century music.
Conductors often memorize monumental works as part of their preparation. Eg Zubin Mehta conducting Bruckner's 8th from memory age 89. That's a way way bigger piece of music than a Mozart sonata - super long and with massive forces. https://parsikhabar.net/music/zubin-mehta-at-89-still-comman...
This is the same as how chess grandmasters know literally hundreds or possibly thousands of games. Extreme example: David Howell tests Magnus Carlsen https://youtu.be/eC1BAcOzHyY?si=I-xJEo4NQUkLPDQ0
...or jazz musicians know hundreds or possibly thousands of standards.
You kind of have to know these things to perform. That being said with memorizing music you have a lot of structure that makes it easier whereas memorizing digits of pi or e you are learning a transcendental number so it may as well be random. You have to impose whatever structure you can, which must surely make it harder.