Gregory Gundersen memorized the first hundred digits of pi in about an hour, in one sitting, and his point is that there was no magic in it. The techniques came from Joshua Foer’s Moonwalking with Einstein, and what they did was convert a shapeless problem — how do you remember this? — into a bounded one with a process and a failure model. “Remembering became engineering.”
The machinery is a person-action-object (PAO) index: 100 people, 100 actions, 100 objects, mapped to the numbers 00-99.
- Six digits encode to a single “glyph” — person from the first pair, action from the second, object from the third
- That yields a million unique images, so six digits cost one mental picture instead of six
- 100 digits is 17 glyphs, which fit into one memory palace: the apartment of an old friend
- Building the PAO was the real work, memorized on the subway commute with Anki cards
What makes the result interesting is that it behaves like a system rather than a performance:
- Errors stay local — a wrong digit is almost always one glyph, usually off by a decade, never a collapse back to the start
- You can pause and resume weeks later by depositing the next glyph in a new palace
- You can run it backwards: walk the palace in reverse, flip each glyph’s two digits
- It scales — seventeen glyphs per hundred digits, so a thousand digits is mostly a palace-addressing problem
His closing argument is the part that is not about pi. The belief that “I can’t do this because I’m not an X person” is usually built on a handful of early experiences nobody ever re-examined. An average memory plus technique and practice, he says, is the whole trick.