More memory

Page 3 of the Guardian seems to be reserved for trivia of one sort or another, and yesterday it included the piece at reference 1 below, about a chap who won the Scrabble championships in Spain on the strength of memorising the words from the Spanish Scrabble dictionary, without being able to speak the language at all.

To which end, he needs to be able to memorise the words and their spelling and then to be able to scan those words for matches and partial matches to particular situations, that is to say the tiles in his hand and the tiles on the board. Scans which need to take place at a speed which fits in with the playing time of 25 minutes - this last being lifted from the rules at reference 3, the top of which is snapped above. A function which is more the sort of thing that computers are good at - rather than humans.

I associated to another sort of special memory, remembering what you were doing on every day of your life and being able to access that information by date. Possibly also by more tricky dates like 'Christmas days which were Fridays'.

I thought one person who might have had this ability was Marion Price, but failed to find her in the archive. Bing soon puts me right with Jill Price, to be found at reference 2. Presumably my memory of the name 'Jill Price' had been damaged or pushed aside by the prominence of the IRA's Marion Price. With the memory of this last person possibly being brought closer to the surface by some Irish talk a couple of days ago.

Which should not have mattered as my search of the archive only used the 'Price' bit of the name, failing only because I did not extend the search back far enough to reach 2013.

References

Reference 1: Outrage in Spain as winner of Scrabble title doesn't speak the language - Ashifa Kassam, Guardian - 2024.

Reference 2: https://psmv2.blogspot.com/2013/04/remainder-shelf.html.

Reference 3: http://www.seattlescrabble.org/data/BasicRules.pdf.

Reference 4: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marian_Price.

Reference 5: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jill_Price.