Out of This World

Video by Kevin D Schmidt

QuEST Discussion - Memory Athletics Speed Card Methods

Air Force Research Laboratory

Feb. 2, 2024 | 01:00:41

In this edition of QuEST, following our discussion last week with the organizers of the USA Memory Championships Tony and Michael D., this week we will fine-grain our description of the methods used to prepare for and compete in the Speed Cards event in memory competitions, based on the subjective report of World Memory Championship Grandmaster Nelson Dellis.

We will begin with a review of the relevant QuEST lecture material (e.g., link game, chunking, etc.), and then continue to explore the reported experiences of mental athletes through the Simulated, Situated, and Structurally coherent Qualia (S3Q) framework of artificial consciousness, in order to propose a set of neuroscience and cognitive modeling experiments to help further understand the boundaries of expert memory performance.

With the psychology and neuroscience mechanisms successfully mapped onto Speed Cards and the S3Q theory, we will then describe approaches to computational modeling of these phenomena for use in implementing novel artificially intelligent agents.

Covering these topics in-depth over several weeks, the conversation could naturally transition to discussing the "types of qualia," as well as a potential thread on discussing "basal cognition..."