Why I Cheat at Wordle: Memory, a Love Story

How We Got Here

You're reading the second installment of "Why I Cheat at Wordle," a short series on memory, ethics, engineering, games, and education that I am publishing simultaneously on LinkedIn and Medium.

In the first installment, Introduction, I shared my own memories, from a lifetime ago, of a man who used a trunkful of index cards to capture glimpses of the lives and stories of the thousands of people he met on his travels, to help him maintain the continuity and connections he made with people who he might not see for months, or possibly years, between his visits.

At the end, I asked, "Did he cheat?" Most people would say "no." His openness about his method proved he had no intention to deceive anyone, his cards did not give him an advantage unavailable to others, and he, for sure, did not intend to cause anyone any harm.

You could argue, in fact, that while his memory was not as prodigious as it might have appeared, he was no intellectual slouch either: he devised a system to effectively extend his memory, he implemented it with precision, and he followed it with discipline. And let's not forget that although did not store in his own head every detail about every person he ever knew, what he did every morning to prepare for the upcoming day was no mean feat either.

But more than the fact that his techniques don't meet the formal definition of "cheating," he also does not match to our moral image of a "cheater": a person who has stolen an unearned place among the company of people who are greater than they.

So let's say, provisionally, that he is not a cheater and did not cheat. Does that mean that we would say, as a matter of principle, that extending one's memory by some "device" has the same value as remembering something oneself?

What You're Good At (And What You Aren't)

Memory—the importance of it, my lack of it, and the things I have to do to compensate for that—is a topic often on my mind.

One of my favorite books in this regard is Moonwalking with Einstein, a 2011 memoir by Joshua Foer that tells the story of his journey from a man with a subpar memory to becoming the USA Memory Champion in 2006.

Outside of being a riveting personal story, and the—dare I say—memorable and entertaining characters Foer meets along the way, Moonwalking with Einstein is a love story about the mind, how it works, and the nature of memory itself.

Foer's journey, of course, didn't happen alone, or in a vacuum. There's a trick he learned. That trick is called a "memory palace." Without going too deeply into cognitive psychology—a field that, without Foer's elucidation, I would know next to nothing about—the key idea is most people are reasonably good at remembering their own homes, the places they've visited, and, generally, getting around in the world. But at the same time, the very same people are often very bad at things like memorizing the order of cards in a randomly-shuffled deck, or the full text of T.S. Eliot's "The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock," the first thousand digits of pi, or other similar things.

If you ask a LISP programmer, they will tell you that everything is just a list: the order of a deck of cards, the phone numbers of all your friends, the arrangement of atoms in the universe. We will come back to lists—they will be a theme in almost every vignette in this love story—so this is an important concept, as it were, to remember: lists might be long or short, complex or simple, abstract or concrete, but a list is just a list. There is nothing particularly unique about the path from your bedroom to your laundry room that makes it conceptually different than any other list. It's just that your brain is optimized to remember some kinds of lists better than others.

In fact, it turns out that most people are not just reasonably good at but actually really, really good at remembering pretty complex paths to make their way around in the world, and also really, really good at remembering visual cues along those paths: the caricature of you and your spouse that you took home from your trip to New York hanging on this wall, the order of the Beanie Babies as they're arranged in the curio.

This is the secret of the Memory Palace: if you can train your mind to map the kinds of lists that you are not good at remembering (like the digits of phone numbers) to the kinds of lists that you are good at remembering (like the order of those Beanie Babies), you can take advantage of the vast reserves of visual computational power in your brain to remember lists of things that you would, otherwise, be perfectly happy to forget.

None of this will help you remember where you left your car keys, or what possessed you to buy all those Beanie Babies in the first place. Memory Palaces—also known as the Method of Loci—are one-trick ponies, or, maybe even less charitably, parlor tricks. They are good for exactly one thing, which is memorizing lists.

Yet it turns out that the ability for even an average person to memorize essentially any list is going to be very important to us.

There Be Prodigies Here

If you ask a random person you know to multiply 639 by 15 in their head, and to give you the answer without any use of pencil or paper or fingers and toes, they will probably either get a far-away look in their eyes while they try to work out the multiply-and-carry rules they learned in grammar school, or stare at you very intently as though you are something close to mad. Most of us, not at all unreasonably, would fail at remembering where we were in the steps of the calculation, what digits belonged in which register, what multiplied by what, and what was added where.

If you happen to care very much about multiplication, or happen to have a lot friends, or perhaps young children, who derive great pleasure from stumping you with math problems, you might look at the problem differently and reason through it in a way that would look miraculous—like listing a long sequence of numbers in an arbitrary order, or memorizing the life details of a thousand people without the aid of a trunk of index cards—to someone who didn't know the "trick."

In this case, of course, 639 is one less than 640, and 15 is half more than 10, so you get a very good approximation by multiplying 640 by 10 (easy for everyone, that's 6,400), and adding half (3,200) again, for a total of 9,600. Looking back at the original numbers, since 639 is 1 less than 640, you will be off by 1 times 15, so by subtracting 15 from your over-estimation, you yield a product of 9,585.

I can't remember the name of the Uber driver who took me to the mall this morning, but I did that in my head.

If you ask me to multiply 617 by 2,856, though, I will come up short.

What's interesting about this isn't that there's a trick—in fact, there are several tricks, including Memory Palaces and a group of algorithms called the Trachtenberg System, that can be used by so called "mental calculators" to achieve performance far greater than mine above. What's interesting is that there are people who are so good at this, using apparently no mental tricks at all, that neither they nor cognitive psychologists have any idea how they do it. They may be exceptionally good at pattern recognition, or they may have certain "hyperconnected" pathways in their brains, or there may be any number of reasons underlying their abilities that we don't understand.

Give Me a Reason

What is obvious, regardless of how well we understand it, is that the human mind is both immensely capable and immensely trainable. It is both more vast and more mysterious than we imagine. Tuned and optimized for whatever kind of problem faces us, either as individuals or as a species, its capabilities are nearly limitless.

You or I might not be human calculators. But human calculators exist. And the Method of Loci—which, by the way, refers to the Latin word for "places," as in the places in your house, and not to a Marvel Comics villain whose name you have forgotten—dates back to at least the 5th century BCE. It is so old and so well-studied and has been proven so thoroughly in practice, that we can state without much risk of exaggeration that the only thing standing between the average person and the ability to memorize long lists of almost anything is time, determination, and a good reason to want to.

Sometimes, that good reason is as simple as money.