
Mark Twain's Memory Builder Game (1891) - znpy
http://www.twainquotes.com/MemoryGame.html
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unreal37
Love the review he got: "The game looked like a cross between an income tax
form and a table of logarithms."

Ha!

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scotch_drinker
It seems like this is less about improving your memory than it is about
showing off your awesome memory of history. While it might be that you'd learn
some new things from your adversary as mentioned, the game would only be fun
with people who know enough history to participate fully. "The accidental
mention of Waterloo will turn loose an inundation of French history" might
have been true in Twain's world but today, I'm not so sure.

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Kenji
It feels good to know that great people like Mark Twain also happened to
create unpopular games, no matter how well thought out it was.

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ardemchenkov
Interesting game, but I think, practically it's not as useful for memory
training as, for example, chess. Because in case of chess, you're not only
storing fixed combinations (debuts especially), but training your brain using
and improving it.

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prapam2
Does playing chess improving memory unrelated to chess gameplay?

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wodenokoto
According to moonwalking with Einstein, no, it doesn't. And the author makes a
pretty good argument about how chess players can easily remember the placement
of multiple chess pieces on a board - as long as they are all in legal
positions.

Show a chess player a board full of randomly placed pieces and they'll have
great trouble remembering the placements. So if their memory doesn't even
transfer to chess pieces, how can we expect it to transfer to other domains?

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ardemchenkov
I think there're no "yes" or "no". It depends on many factors. You're talking
about "Moonwalking with Einstein", but from other point of view there's a book
"How life imitates chess" by Garry Kasparov, which I recommended a couple of
comments below. For me, this source is reliable.

"Show a chess player a board full of randomly placed pieces and they'll have
great trouble remembering the placements" \- how about "Chess960"? It uses
almost random positions in the beginning, which of course doesn't allow you to
use already known debuts. But if we check the list of world champions,
there're the same Top grossmeisters: Aronyan, Svidler, Nakamura.

I think we will have a very good practical answer in a few years. Because in
2011 the Ministry of Education of Armenia started an educational program about
teaching chess in schools. This sounds very interesting and soon we will know
if it helps to improve something or not.

