Posts like this remind me what an amazing phenomenon Internet is. 20 years ago a question like this would have been left unanswered. I hope we get to protect and keep Internet for generations to come.
Not only would it have been left unanswered, it would have been almost impossible to get an answer even with enormous resources. You could have paid a detective agency millions of dollars and the chance that one of them would stumble upon an obscure memory test containing the numbers would have been slim to none, even with tens of thousands of man-hours dedicated to the task.
Tangentially related, I've had some success Googling constants before. For example, I once got interested in the constants in the Harris-Benedict function for estimating basal metabolic rates. By searching for these constants, I quickly found the original text and some other interesting related material.
This approach generalizes to strings as well. In my field of computer networking, you're an easy search away from finding out what 0x0800 means with very little context.
Searches can also work for numbers that don't look familiar. For example, you'd immediate recognize the first few digits of π, but you might not so easily recognize π²≈9.86960440109.
Probably someone with some good search engine skills. Considering most of the numbers are exact matches, searching for those exact numbers should result in a hit if it has been crawled
maybe so, but it's unlikely, in the past, she would have been using an obscure memory test on the internet but instead would have been using something available right in the house
> 20 years ago a question like this would have been left unanswered.
Maybe, but she also would not have had access herself to the internet, and so a series of numbers like this would have been related to a book in the house or local library or at worst a TV show that others would have seen, and therefore much easier to find.
Sure, but my point is that mitigating the higher difficulty of finding the answer (as compared to "search the internet"), the possibilities were fewer too. "What had she read recently? Check her library records, magazine subscriptions and viewing habits. Did she spend time in a doctor's waiting room?" Not many more possibilities outside of those. One of your respondents said that finding the answer would have been "almost impossible". On the contrary, it might have been as easy as calling a research librarian with a time range and the relatively small list of possible resources she would have had access to, e.g. "Cosmopolitan, Psychology Today, Reader's Digest, Stephen King's The Stand, W Magazine and The Springfield Local Tattler"
Having been in the 1980s a person who has taken calls like that at a library, I think you are vastly underestimating the difficulty of finding things without search engines. E.g., my dad had subscribed to the Grand Rapids Press for something like 40 years when he died. That's 14600 individual issues that would need to be searched, not counting the many magazines he subscribed to at different times. Indexes would give you article topics, but would not do much to help find articles that might have long strings of random numbers. So what we're talking about is paging through thousands to hundreds of thousands of pages of paper and/or microfiche looking to see if those random numbers appear somewhere.
He said both notebook and journal, but the page was undated, so who knows. Some people are pretty chaotic. Plus periodicals can indefinitely hang around in whole or in part, so a search that would give you some confidence could still be quite extensive.
Not only that, but it would have been 20 minutes of a programme on the history channel with speculation about demons, aliens, the sensitivity of cats to witchcraft, and messages from the beyond.
As someone old enough to have had a glimpse of the time before the internet I'd say definitely the former. The fact that almost everyone can find the answer to almost anything in almost no time is a historic break that in my opinion is hardly to underestimate. Of course it didn't solve all our problems and brought a couple of new ones with it.
There wasn't a search engine for Usenet for a long time (other than grep'ing the spool dirs), which was frustrating. I would argue it's more like some combo of "more people connected together who can answer, an ability to quickly find relevant pervious answers, coupled with some amount of social capital accrual that makes taking the time to answer worthwhile". Those things make me think 'internet' is at least a big part of the answer.
The first page results would have answered it already - better than the stackexchange answers quoting random slides:
925
8642
37654
627418
0401473
19223530
486854332
2531971768
85129619450
918546942937
Figure 1: Digit Memory Test by Howard (1983, in Bernstein et al., 2008:215).
"Essentials of Psychology" Douglas A. Bernstein, Peggy W. Nash which is on the net has it (spaced out - "9 2 5")
They reference Howard which doesn't seem to be 'available'
Here is a test of your immediate memory span (Howard, 1983). Ask someone to read to you the numbers in the top row at the rate of about one per second; then try to repeat them back in the same order. Then try the next row, and the one after that, until you make a mistake. Your immediate memory span is the maximum number of items you can repeat back perfectly.
They made a point of this being your memory span, but it's definitely something which can be trained. This is something we would do as part of (professional) language transcription/translation, just recording mass amounts of numbers, because those tend to be important.
Just for fun, it would be cool if each of us remembers to take the time to leave at least 1 or 2 little puzzles for our descendants to figure out, as a way to have happier feelings again one last time with you, in a way. My grandpa would totally have done something like this. I remember he showed me a big book of unsolved lost locations of buried treasure, and a related story he read me about a golden key hidden behind a wooden tile of Key West, FL in a large, painted wooden wall map of that part of the ocean.
I'd totally love to leave a little puzzle for those I love. Maybe we could all try to remember to do so, or do it now way in advance by setting up cloud compute accounts running a script like a time capsule that will send out certain messages at a specific date in the future.
I'm away from my family (with a 3.5yo kid) and I've been annoying them and reminding them of my existence daily by talking to them over the security system, replaying "I love papa" songs in our Tesla when they drive and making the car fart when my daughter walks by it.
I like to think if something happens to me, my wife could impersonate my "ghost in the machine" presence for a bit.
In the last three years, I have lost my dad and my mother and father in law. Don't worry, you will leave puzzles behind you whether you want it or not. Taking care of the administrative remains of a modern human being is a big big puzzle.
> Just for fun, it would be cool if each of us remembers to take the time to leave at least 1 or 2 little puzzles for our descendants to figure out, as a way to have happier feelings again one last time with you, in a way.
If you and your loved ones like puzzles, sure, but it’s a stretch to say each of us should do it. For many (I’d bet “most”) it’d just be frustrating to come up with or try to decrypt the puzzle.
Do whatever makes sense for your case. I remember (but am failing to find) a story about someone who had Mario Kart on N64 and showed it to their grandfather who enjoyed it so much he bought an N64 and Mario Kart (and only that game) for himself. When they played together, the grandfather always won. Years later, after the grandfather died, they got his old game and console and occasionally played against their grandfather’s Mario Kart ghosts. They still failed to beat any of them, and that triggered fond memories.
Aww that is incredibly heartwarming to hear about that Mario Kart story. It would be interesting for video gamers of today to leave video recordings for their descendants of their best ever runs on certain games that they love, because the idea of racing against one's grandpa's ghost to learn all his old tricks from seeing him do them is beautiful.
I've decided to make videos to leave for my descendants and family. Even just one person sitting and describing memories of people with a few family pictures looped in has to be interesting eventually. I'd love to hear my great grandparents talk about the dumb stuff in their life.
It's a funny reminder of humans that this random info in a notebook made the person jump to "she was into numerology and left us a puzzle" rather than "oh these are just some things she wrote down"
Remember, humans are pattern matching machines and will torture a pattern out of ANYTHING. Think horses not zebras, and it's never the compilers fault.
A few hours ago, while searching for something completely unrelated (decoding serial numbers for some obscure equipment) on Google, this odd result showed up and I decided to have a glance out of curiosity, but now to see someone else submitted this exact same page to HN and that it's on the front page? A very puzzling coincidence indeed!?
Before moving from my childhood home I collected a fair amount of shiny stones and hide them in a coffin in the woods. And also made a treasure map and hid it in the house. I wonder if anyone has found it.
To me it seemed like numbers which could be split into two equal groups were the easiest. 235 431, 4475 3268 etc.
I also sang the numbers in my head and tried to memorize by repeating the melody after the numbers disappeared.
There is probably a reason why level 11 seems to be so prevalent. Phone numbers could be a factor, but to be honest, I don't know a single phone number by heart, which is probably due to my young age. Never had to memorize a phone number...
The best training for me are probably 2FA codes, so up to 6 digits I should have it covered ;)
EDIT: I realize that I just called you old. Sorry.
I was honestly surprised that I reached level 11, the last 3 levels felt like I completely forgot the number, but my subconsciousness seemed to remember after all. Missed out by 1 number as well on the last one :')
Sigh. I am going to spend too much of the rest of my life squinting at glib, confident prose and trying to figure out whether it makes any sense at all. “Your scientists were so preoccupied with whether or not they could, they didn't stop to think if they should.”
Looking forward to Scientist GPT. Did they fudge the data? Nope! They pulled it straight out of their model. (Someone needs to make a "publish paper" button backed by Chat GPT)
It's that intersection of confident and so on its face, even at first glance, wildly incorrect that it just makes you feel like you're the stupid one who's missing something obvious
Right? I have spent a long time building up an ability to measure quality of thought via quality of prose as a proxy. This breaks that almost entirely, because they decided to train it for glibness with little regard for correctness.
Actually, so far I've seen humanities people discard chatGPT output faster than sciences.
In the humanties there is lots of well-written text of no useful depth, so academics in the humanities get good at filtering it quickly. In the sciences, it seems "this is well written and well structured" is treated as a filter to assume the text probably contains something worth reading -- of course eventually it is found to be nonsense.
> ...a professor in the U.K., used GPT-3, a large language model from OpenAI that automatically generates text from a prompt, to write it. (The whole essay, which Sharples considered graduate-level, is available, complete with references, here.) Personally, I lean toward a B+. The passage reads like filler, but so do most student essays.
> It's difficult to say what these numbers might represent without more context. They could be a list of numerical data, possibly related to a particular topic or theme. They could also be codes or identifiers for something, or possibly even a series of random numbers. Without more information, it's hard to provide a more specific suggestion.
I only gave it the info that was available in the question, all it came up with were different variations of "no idea".
I've seen a lot of similar confident but utterly nonsensical responses from ChatGPT. It really comes across as the ultimate con artist. Project confidence and drown people in so many words that they start doubting themselves instead of ChatGPT. We may have taught AI to gaslight us.
I tried it on the you.com chatbot, which has access to search results of your query. Even though it was already spoiled by receiving a link to this thread in which the correct answer is literally listed, it still managed to come up with nonsense:
> The numbers appear to be arranged in an exponential pattern [1], where each number is approximately 2.3 times larger than the previous number. This pattern can be expressed as: n = 2.3^x, where n is the number and x is the index of the number. So for the numbers you provided, the pattern would be: 925 = 2.3^0 8642 = 2.3^2 37654 = 2.3^3 627418 = 2.3^4
