You play a game where you have to memorize a random passphrase and recite it the next day for $1000, game repeats each day but with +1word and +$1000 prize; How many days can you continue this?

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.

Do a web search for "mnemonic technique memory linking". There's a technique for just this sort of application.

The pay is more than I make in my current job starting on day 1. 100 days would be over 5 million dollars, enough to retire on. I can devote 8 hours per day for 3.5 months for retirement level money memorizing a list of 100 words.

Person woman man camera tv

Person woman man camera tv cockroach

I forgot the start of this topic title when I arrived at the end so I would say negative 1 day

ADHD moment 🫩 (me fr)
- That ADHD + aphantasia mix is real nice. I have so many memory palaces, too bad they are all painted black and someone forgot to pay the electricity bill.
- welcome to the club

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.

My neighbour plays this game with us. He has a pile of cards. Every card has a word on it. Short and long all mixed up. You shuffle the deck and he laysbdown the cards one by one. After he went throigh the cards he just szs the wordt in order from memory. He can get up to 150 card. He never rails before 100.

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.

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.
- Julius and Augustus?

Bohemian Rhapsody is nearly 400 words, and I could recite that at any moment.

I can't even remember the title of this post.

But did you died?

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	          21,000.00

I think I'll get pretty far. I've always been good at memorizing things like this. I think for words I'll turn it into a song in my head or something.

I'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

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.
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)

100s probably. With that level of reward I'd be able to memorize a lot of things.

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 :-)

For that money I would be repeating the words all day like a mantra in order to not forget them. I want to think I could last at least one month.

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.

That's literally only one word to memorize each day. I can speak comfortably without a break for about thirty minutes, so let's buy that as a conservative upper bound for speaking without errors. Assuming two seconds per word, that's 30^2 or 900 days, between 2 and 3 years.

Currently on day 197.

Whoops.

I've said too much.

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.

I'd give it about a week before my cryptolalia betrays me.

Wait you're saying that after N days you get N(N+1)/2 total dollars? I think you're underestimating yourself saying you'd max at 12 words. Doing 1000+ doesn't seem outlandish. You get a day for each additional word, you can use part of the day to make up mnemonics and so on. Lots of people memorize digits of pi to 100s or 1000s of places and this is kind of similar.

After 1 year you're at $67K, 2 years $267K, 3 years $600K, and so on. Pretty cushy gig after the first year if you can keep it up.

Edit: that should have all been in K$ as pointed out below. So $67M after the first year.

Your math is off by three orders of magnitude. After one year, you’d have $66.8M.
- I bet they did the classic n(n+1)/2 but forgot to multiply by $1000.
- Oh lol, yeah I was starting at $1, $2, etc. Ha. Yes I think it is easier than you're making it out to be. I use random pass phrases for various computer things and don't have trouble remembering a few of them. I guess the main problem is if you get caught out by long or weird words.
Bruh, 3 years is 1100 words 💀
No way lol, I stuggle to remember things a lot, too much depression and brain fog.
- Not as tough as it seems. People routinely memorize much more in shorter periods. Try learning the complete Kanji (Asian Pictograms) or heiroglyphics. It's not inconceivable to memorize 10,000 random words. Think of how many songs you can recite the lyrics to. I learned Billy Joel's, "We Didn't Start the Fire" in a day. That's pretty much what this challenge is about - a random list of words.
Literally zero people in here could remember 1000 random words in the correct order this way. No one. Most people couldn’t do 10. No one would get close to 50.
- Hermann Ebbinghaus has entered the chat. He studied this sort of thing with nonsense syllables. You have to work at it, but yes most people can learn and repeat hundreds of them.
- Oh come on, 10 is pretty easy. Here is 10: comply-pone's-mi's-NyQuil-Agassi-fowled-should-gabs-tipis-carrel
  Try writing them down on a piece of paper, repeat them to yourself once or twice, then see if you can write them on a 2nd piece of paper from memory, referring to the 1st piece as needed, but not just copying. Then do the same with a 3rd piece of paper and so on. You should be able to remember all 10 within a few minutes of that. Then do something else for 30 minutes, then try to write down the phrase again, referring to an earlier paper if you have to.
  Would I do that just for giggles? Maybe not. For $1000? Heck yes. I'm sure you could too. Getting to 50 by adding 1 word a day for 1.5 months, no big deal either. Like almost every nerd I memorized some pi digits (I stopped at 50, unlike some) as a kid. I still remember them. Many people I know did 100+ and some I don't know have done 1000+. In fact the record seems to be above 100,000: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Piphilology

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?

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.

depends on how it's delivered. If it's all at once then around 7 as it would be my maximum for working memory. If I could make the input piecemeal then 100+ with great effort would be possible. For the first few days I would need to hit the research about mnemotechnics and learn it how to do it.

You get paid the moment you get it right. So you can go on forever if your brain is big enough to store all the words.
- My streak would depend if someone would tell me the phasprase once or multiple times? Would they pause on request, every five words or tell everything without stop?

When I was busking I had about 60 songs memorised. The first few I learned took ages to cement themselves, but the more I learned the easier it was to learn new ones. Memory is like a muscle; the more you use it the better it works. I haven't played in public in about ten years, but I've still got a couple of dozen songs I can remember, and it only takes a little brushing up to get back the ones I'm rusty on.

I think people would do better at this challenge than they expect.

At the very least, there's a 50/50 chance I get $1000 dollars for free...

If it's song lyrics like the first lyrics to something like Soul Coughing's So Far I Have Not Found The Science or Crush 40's Free then I am safe. Otherwise, good chance I forget.

Three tops

You can do better for $1k, I believe in your ability to hit at least six

I memorised 100 digits of pi 20 years ago so I'll just use those, I can get $100k easy. Finally this will come in handy for something

It's a random pass phrase. So you don't get to choose the words.
- Bugger. Still not useful for anything then

Zero days because I don't do stuff for money that I don't enjoy.