You play a game where you have to memorize a random passphrase and recite it the next day for $1000, game repeats each day but with +1word and +$1000 prize; How many days can you continue this?

In my youth I memorised some 50 digits of pi in a similar fashion for fun. Considering 1000 USD i could and should treat it as a full time job I'm guessing a month or so before my laziness gets in the way and I make a mistake.

Do a web search for "mnemonic technique memory linking". There's a technique for just this sort of application.

The pay is more than I make in my current job starting on day 1. 100 days would be over 5 million dollars, enough to retire on. I can devote 8 hours per day for 3.5 months for retirement level money memorizing a list of 100 words.

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I forgot the start of this topic title when I arrived at the end so I would say negative 1 day

I'm a biologist, undergrad was tons of memorizing lists of vaguely related words. Since it's an additive list and it's literally the only thing I'd have to do, 100+ at least. 200+ if it forms any sort of coherent sentence. Every day, all I'd be doing is practicing the previous list and learning one new word.

Edit: for giggles, I calculated how much you'd earn at 100 days, then 200. The formula is T= 1000(n(n+1))/2 for anyone who is curious.

At 100 days, you'd have $5,050,000.

At 200, $20,100,000.

My neighbour plays this game with us. He has a pile of cards. Every card has a word on it. Short and long all mixed up. You shuffle the deck and he laysbdown the cards one by one. After he went throigh the cards he just szs the wordt in order from memory. He can get up to 150 card. He never rails before 100.

If you just asked me to repeat a phrase that someone said earlier in the day, I'd have no idea.

But, if I have 24 hours in between, and it's worth thousands of dollars, I'd make a little song out of it and it'll probably the only thing that would be in my head all day every day.

I think I'll get pretty far. I've always been good at memorizing things like this. I think for words I'll turn it into a song in my head or something.

I can't even remember the title of this post.

Bohemian Rhapsody is nearly 400 words, and I could recite that at any moment.

Honestly? I'm failing day one. Took me until my mid-twenties just to memorise the order of months.

I think i can get to 40ish words. I mean i have a whole day to focus on remembering the words, and it's not ridiculously hard since its only 1 additional word per day, while the rest remain the same. It seems if I do make it to 40 words, i would have earned 666,000.00 USD which is pretty amazing. here's table of the first 10 words:

Day | Cash per day	| Number of words |	cumulative earned
1	1,000.00	         5	           1,000.00
2	2,000.00	         6	           3,000.00
3	3,000.00	         7	           6,000.00
4	4,000.00	         8	          10,000.00
5	5,000.00	         9	          15,000.00
6	6,000.00	         10	          21,000.00

100s probably. With that level of reward I'd be able to memorize a lot of things.

I'm genuinely not sure, but if it is literally just one additional word per day on top of the previous words that don't change... I've memorized a length 35+ randomly generated password (with special characters) out of spite just a year ago. I think I will do fine in this game, at least for 20-30 days. My memory might not handle anything more than that

Especially since... if my calculations are correct, doing this game for 29 days consecutively would net you $435K, an amount so large that it is larger than the median wealth in the country with the highest median wealth currently in the world ($413,193/adult in 2024); another few days would get you over the average ($498,290/adult) as well. So there is a pretty strong incentive to just do this full time and really give you all

Fun fact, when I was in middle school in China (not sure if they do it anymore) we were expected to memorize whole ancient Chinese poems and literary critiques written by the likes of Lu Xun... with like a month each. They actually appear on the exams and we were supposed to just know the entire poems cover to cover. Which is about the difficulty of this challenge with way less rewards

I think funnier ways to do this would include progressively introducing weirder words (old English or borrowed words from other languages like rendezvous or schnitzel), roll a dice on how many words are added (jackpot: now remember 30 more words at once!), make you only have 5 minutes to remember and then keep going on a live show, etc... These would make a fun reality TV show actually

As it sounds like there's no risk involved (ie, if I get 5 days right and then the 6th one wrong, I still keep all the money from the 5 days), I think I could probably do this for at least 10 days and probably more. Which would work out at $55k, I think? Not too bad.

For anyone wondering, I think you'd have to keep going for 141 days to get to a million. Keep it up for a year and you'd win $66,795,000.

A billion would take 1414 days (3.87 years), and to pass Musk's current total (480.1b, according to a quick search) you'd need to keep getting it right for... longer than I'm willing spend time on to make my spreadsheet calculate. I'm sure there a formula to work it out, but I'll leave that to someone else :-)

I have a terrible memory, but for the money you're giving, I would invest a decent amount of time into reciting this over and over for hours and make it into a game the best I can. Considering the potential of this making all my financial issues go away, it seems like a very easy solution.

For that money I would be repeating the words all day like a mantra in order to not forget them. I want to think I could last at least one month.

I am very unsure. With your example, I think I could go for awhile, those particular words are pretty sticky, I could chant them mentally, make a tune & sing them. And I'd be motivated, first day it's already it's already more than I make at work, right? So this is the new job? I would try for a month, a cool half million would certainly fix our budget even after taxes.

Correct horse, battery staple

What I don't know is whether I could avoid cheating - if my kids heard me singing these they would pick it up and they have wicked good memories. They would be chanting it the next day. And if I couldn't say them out loud it would make it more difficult. So might be immediately DQ'd.

Currently on day 197.

Whoops.

I've said too much.

That's literally only one word to memorize each day. I can speak comfortably without a break for about thirty minutes, so let's buy that as a conservative upper bound for speaking without errors. Assuming two seconds per word, that's 30^2 or 900 days, between 2 and 3 years.

Three tops

When I was busking I had about 60 songs memorised. The first few I learned took ages to cement themselves, but the more I learned the easier it was to learn new ones. Memory is like a muscle; the more you use it the better it works. I haven't played in public in about ten years, but I've still got a couple of dozen songs I can remember, and it only takes a little brushing up to get back the ones I'm rusty on.

I think people would do better at this challenge than they expect.

depends on how it's delivered. If it's all at once then around 7 as it would be my maximum for working memory. If I could make the input piecemeal then 100+ with great effort would be possible. For the first few days I would need to hit the research about mnemotechnics and learn it how to do it.

At the very least, there's a 50/50 chance I get $1000 dollars for free...

If it's song lyrics like the first lyrics to something like Soul Coughing's So Far I Have Not Found The Science or Crush 40's Free then I am safe. Otherwise, good chance I forget.

Wait you're saying that after N days you get N(N+1)/2 total dollars? I think you're underestimating yourself saying you'd max at 12 words. Doing 1000+ doesn't seem outlandish. You get a day for each additional word, you can use part of the day to make up mnemonics and so on. Lots of people memorize digits of pi to 100s or 1000s of places and this is kind of similar.

After 1 year you're at $67K, 2 years $267K, 3 years $600K, and so on. Pretty cushy gig after the first year if you can keep it up.

Edit: that should have all been in K$ as pointed out below. So $67M after the first year.

Memorizing the first 5 words would be the hardest, after that any mnemonic technique would allow you to keep going for a LONG time since it's essentially memorizing one word a day.

How much time do we have to memorize it?

I'd give it about a week before my cryptolalia betrays me.

I memorised 100 digits of pi 20 years ago so I'll just use those, I can get $100k easy. Finally this will come in handy for something

Zero days because I don't do stuff for money that I don't enjoy.