When Sempi and I go on walks, we occasionally discuss something we both find interesting.
Today during our walk today, I told Sempi memory is a tricky thing. If we have to remember a sequence of numbers some of them are really easy but others are hard.
For example, we can easily remember 1,2,3,4,5,6,7. We can also remember 7,6,5,4,3,2,1 but it is quite hard for us to remember a random sequence like 3,4,2,5,1,7,6. For a computer remembering 1,2,3,4,5,6,7 takes the same effort as remember a random sequence like 3,4,2,5,1,7,6.
His response was, if you write down the numbers on a paper, you won’t have to remember them at all. That’s what the computers do. They write them down in a file so they can retrieve it later. That’s why it is the same effort for them to remember a random sequence as well as a regular sequence.
I thought that was a pretty clever analogy.