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.

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

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 can’t even remember the title of this post.

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

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

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 :-)

Currently on day 197.

Whoops.

I’ve said too much.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Three tops

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.