17 KiB
From R/Askreddit: For the next 24 hours you have picture perfect memory. What do you memorize to make the most money?
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Author: u/andor3333 *
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URL: https://www.reddit.com/r/AskReddit/comments/6fz3gj/for_the_next_24_hours_you_have_picture_perfect/
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Score: 25
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Created: 2017-06-08T15:55:17
Post:
Comments:
u/OutOfNiceUsernames [+18] fear of last pages (7 hours later)
As an alternative extreme approach, one also could be careful to stay the next 24 hours blindfolded because:
it doesn't say anything about also having the required secondary powers — so no magical mental hammerspace would be provided to this power's temporary user, and the newly memorized information could potentially get forcibly recorded over other, also important, parts of the memories \ brain.
there aren't any known prior testings of this power on humans, so even using it very sparingly could end up having some unforeseen, unwanted, and irreversible consequences.
u/andor3333 [+14] (2 minutes later)
I think it really depends on what picture perfect memory is. If I just need a glance I would immediately crowdsource to some friends to retrieve as much important information as possible, and task someone to do a rush job and write a program for a bunch of computers to rapidly display various documents.
If it is only what I can read instead of glance at, maybe some of the more popular scientific journals and things that are notoriously difficult to memorize?
Languages? Chemistry and Engineering tables?
u/TheLegendofFredDurst [+21] (35 minutes later)
This power is relatively useless unless one can access the memories after the 24 hours.
If you can, this is a veritable Pandora's Box of munchkinable content. If this is the case I would probably go through a and speedread a few dozen programming language books and guides, as well as a few dozen math textbooks.
If not, I'm having trouble concocting a profitable scheme with a 24-hour maximum time limit that wouldn't also involve a massive amount of illegal stuff that one would probably be caught after the fact via papertrail.
u/andor3333 [+12] (an hour later)
Good point, I was thinking of the memories as being retained. It would be much harder to munchkin this if it vanished after 24 hours, but I bet it could still be done. Especially in the version where you just have to glance at the information to remember it.
The key in the 24 hour version might be finding an area with massive volumes of information where you can make money by picking out a bunch of small details that are otherwise unnoticed.
u/TheLegendofFredDurst [+10] (2 hours later)
I think your most surefire gamble to maximize payout would be to try for the Rhandi prize (and hope he accepts some ridiculous short notice scheduling).
Clearly there is no one aggregated pile of information where knowledge of specific details would benefit you in 24 hours worth of time (computers would be able to parse this in that same timeframe). Thus, the only way to make money off of the 24 hour version would be either off the fact you have a demonstrably supernatural ability, or via some ingenius way of exploiting it on an individual basis (say, memorizing credit card info or bank accounts or something).
I can think of no way to exploit the ambiguous financial theft option that doesn't result in me having to flee my home country or getting arrested due to the trail. Maybe convert the money to bitcoin or something and do some small proxy trades via huge botnet?
u/Roxolan [+7] Head of antimemetiWalmart senior assistant manager (8 hours later)
try for the Rhandi prize
How do you plan to demonstrate the supernaturalness of your memory? There are a lot of mnemonists and memory geniuses. You might have them all beaten, but from the outside, that could just mean you have more talent or better techniques.
u/TheLegendofFredDurst [+2] (21 hours later)
If you could quickly thumb through a random ~500 page book in 5 minutes and then read randomly chosen lines off of randomly chosen pages, that would be pretty convincing evidence. You can even do this in languages you don't know or with unfamiliar calligraphy (katakana, arabic, whatever). You can do this with other visual media like pictures or high speed video. You can demonstrate this from an auditory standpoint as well. Smell and touch would be a bit hard to demonstrate.
I highly doubt any real world memory geniuses can actually memorize something perfectly, on one try, in only the time it takes to take the barest glance at a page of the written material. That level of photographic memory is science fiction, if someone were to have perfect visual recall at that level, I would guess they would develop some serious neurological problems as their brain strains to store all that information.
You would need to store the equivalent of an HD resolution video that is about as long as 2/3rds of that person's lifetime (accounting for sleep). 100 hours of HD vid at a decent framerate needs about 1TB worth of storage. Thats just a little over a week of someone's life. The brain is a marvelously efficient piece of machinery, but it isn't enough. You'd have to be a god.
Edit: Of course, the issue of whether you can verify this after the 24 hours is up (he may call bullshit on you after that time to prevent you from getting a cool million) comes into play. But this still has a decent chance of earning a relativley high amount of money in a 24-hour timeframe using this power, in a legal fashion. As I said previously, I cannot think of a good way to game this ability if the recall only lasts the 24 hour period, without doing something illegal and easily traceable that isn't even guaranteed to provide a decent amount of money as a return.
u/andor3333 [+4] (3 hours later)
I guess the difference is I am assuming comprehension of the ideas at a level a computer wouldn't have. (Lets say about what I would have from reading through it normally.) If this is just memorization and I can only recite it with no understanding of what I read it wouldn't work and I agree.
I can think of a couple of aggregated areas of knowledge this trick could work on. I'll give an example. The patent database has millions of patents. Most of them are abandoned. There are even more in other countries assuming I can learn languages super fast first. Some of them are abandoned because someone couldn't get funded or their business collapsed, or for some other non-idea quality related reason. Lets say I got someone to rush a program to display a bunch of information and played through a massive rolling list of all patent applications ever.
I bet there is at least one patent is abandoned but actually useful and plausible to make money. Since it is abandoned I can monetize it. Some information may also be incorrect or exaggerated. However, I just need to identify a few hundred of the most promising inventions and write them down before my memory gets fried.
u/TheLegendofFredDurst [+4] (5 hours later)
Point: I am probably being far too pessimistic in my assumptions that "someone would have done something of that sort already, if it was viable."
In all fairness though, just having a patent for a good idea isn't enough. You also need the channels and ability to market the idea to someone who will pay for it, or some way to pay for any start up costs such an invention/venture would cost. Cold calling CEO's isn't going to get you very far, and I imagine high profile people like Elon Musk (or rather, his answering machine/secretary)get about a dozen of those a week.
If it was a specific example of some code for say, a friendly AI, then you may likely find someone on here that would know a guy who knows a guy who could work something out with (big name tech industry guy), but: (1) everyone in that chain would probably demand a cut, (2) You may not luck out in that fashion, and the avenue of approach as far as any middlemen (who are accessible to you, yet possess the contact info and connection to someone that can make the patent happen, all at a reasonable percentage of course) are concerned is much less obvious.
(And admittedly, that may be quite a dumb example contextually speaking (you could probably build such an AI yourself if you have the code and hardware specifications on hand), but lets assume that for some reason it costs a few million for the relevant hardware, or somesuch. You get the gist of where I'm coming from.)
u/andor3333 [+2] (5 hours later)
Those are all good points. I guess the reason it wouldn't have been done before is that very few people have the time and willingness to read through that many patents. I am a patent attorney and occasionally look through a patent class during searches. In my experience patents are not organized in a way that makes for easy reading at all. They are dense and don't stay on topic and are more concerned with covering every possible legal hedge on what the idea is for a hypothetical court case. Some are 80 years out of date. Some aren't classified correctly. Some are just wrong. The only way to go through enough to make it viable would be something like this where you had an unusual way to pull the useful information out of them quickly. In a particular area/class you could probably look at all of them, but there are way too many for anyone to do this for the entire database.
I agree that most ideas would not be viable, and it isn't as simple as snapping your fingers and coming up with idea. The idea is a small fraction of what you need to make money. I have seen plenty of hilariously awful patents and business plans that flopped at the starting gate, but I bet there are at least a handful of objectively good ideas with a low startup cost buried somewhere in there for a crazy superhuman with an eidetic memory to pull out. Of course there might be no good way to verify the ideas during that short a time period, but it seems worth a shot.
There are a probably handful of other similar information graveyards to scrounge through to hedge bets, though it would be hard to identify them before you ran out of time.
u/TheLegendofFredDurst [+3] (5 hours later)
I'll reluctantly bow to your wisdom on that particular matter.
Gee, the long term application of this power may be a Law student's wet dream, now that I think about it.
u/andor3333 [+2] (5 hours later)
Pretty much. So many statutes and so little time and sanity to spend on them. I wouldn't wish that on anybody though. That many laws stuck forever in your head would probably do something terrible and irreversible to your mind... Case in point: the average lawyer.
u/TheLegendofFredDurst [+2] (5 hours later)
I'm a math grad student, so I can certainly sympathize with that.
u/CFCrispyBacon [+2] (13 hours later)
Or that many patents. Patent agent here (there are dozens of us! Dozens!). I'm probably going to have nightmares now of thousands of pages of awful, useless patents stuck in my head forever. Nicely done.
u/andor3333 [+3] (14 hours later)
Hold on. You clearly aren't thinking of all the all the incredible benefits you're walking away from here:
Amaze and impress your friends at parties with your superhuman ability to attach collapsible handles to otherwise useful objects! Become the world's foremost authority on 18th century asbestos carriage brakes! Generate an endless stream of new designs for nonfunctional perpetual motion machines built from common household appliances with a single glance and never ever forget them!
Truly, who could pass up a chance at such incredible power? Someone needs to patent the method for doing this immediately!
u/CFCrispyBacon [+2] (22 hours later)
Heck, memorize the entire catalog! Tell your clients how horrible their idea is instantly! Relax in the knowledge that no idea has ever been novel, and never will be!
u/andor3333 [+2] (23 hours later)
I'm pretty sure I can already do that with a basic google search and common sense about half the time. No catalog memorization required. The problem is getting them to listen...
Or you could apply to be a patent examiner and send some poor troll into orbit with an office action correctly citing 100 different sources.
u/CFCrispyBacon [+1] (23 hours later)
...ok, that might be the only way that becoming a patent examiner would be worth it. That'd be hilarious.
u/Veedrac [+1] (2 days later)
I highly doubt you could organize the Rhandi prize that quickly; I'd hardly call it surefire.
u/TheLegendofFredDurst [+1] (2 days later)
To be fair I called it the "most surefire gamble". Nothing is foolproof....
u/rhaps0dy4 [+8] (3 hours later)
Why so much programming languages? The documentation is right there at your fingertips, all the time.
Math theorems might be handy, if you gain some understanding at the same time as you memorize them. If you just have them as images in your head and you can only copy them down, then it's not so useful anymore.
u/TheLegendofFredDurst [+8] (4 hours later)
I personally don't need to learn programming, I know how to program. It would be useful to spend about 6-12 hours and learn two dozen programming languages worth of syntax and other related things unique to each language. I personally would go through SQL, C, C++,Haskell, Javascript, Python, etc. All those well known languages that see some use. Combine that with a few data structures/algorithm books and Cracking the Coding Interview, and you can easily ace most of anything they'd ask you in a job interview. Theres your 80k+ starting salary right there, provided you have a college degree in a related field. Instead of spending years getting to the point where you can code reliably in all these languages, you did it in an afternoon. That's a pretty good return, in my opinion.
Memorizing mathematical theorems would not help you. Anyone in math should be able to mention big name theorems and understand (more or less) how the proof goes. Its the pages upon pages of definitions, one-off lemmas , examples and counterexamples, and the actual proofs of all of these that will be beneficial. If I spent 6-12 hours just flipping through graduate texts so that I have all that in my head, ready at a moments notice, then this would be a great boon. Of course, one should go back and learn all these things the normal way, but it would be much easier to internalize the material if you've already merely memorized it.
You would be surprised at how many things boil down to (some dumb problem, theorem, or exercise you solved years ago but forgot)
u/jldew [+8] (4 hours later)
If I'm able to to retain the information, chem and engineering tables and text books. Then I would move to programming and CAD and Photoshop. You don't actually have to read the textbook. Then do math proofs and thesis papers. With those, it would be childs play to test out of the programs you need for a degree in the field you choose, land a well paying job and use your knowledge to bootstrap to CEO. A few books in psychology and social behavior, as well as management textbook or two and you'd probably be set.
u/Dwood15 [+3] (a day later)
I'd do a couple of things. First off:
- Reread the important parts of my Electrical Engineering manuals.
- Study Assembly languages - If you can memorize even smaller, older Assembly Languages, you're basically set for programming as every language builds off them. Additionally, this is a 24 hour period and even with the buff my attention would be focused on more interesting stuff. --That would also give me an excuse to pore over old video game architectures.
The rest of the info I'd study would be dumb stats and things for League of Legends, probably.
u/Shnatsel [+2] (12 days later)
Stock market history cross-referenced with relevant news selection, obviously.
I've also estimated the amount of information that can be transferred (and presumably stored) this way, see my AskReddit comment.
u/ferb2 [+0] (3 days later)
tease memorize hurry chubby march pen simplistic truck spark provide
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u/None [+1] (4 days later)
It doesn't give you super intelligence it only gives you a good memory.