Brainy chimp beats national memory champion in computer game

A brainy chimpanzee has left a national memory champion red faced after beating him at a computer game.

Ayumu, a seven-year-old male chimp brought up in captivity in Japan, thrashed British champion Ben Pridmore at the game which involved remembering the position of numbers on a screen.

Pridmore, a 30-year-old accountant from Derby, can memorise the order of a shuffled pack of 52 playing cards in less than 30 seconds, but couldn’t beat the chimp.

Ayumu and Pridmore had to watch a computer screen on which numbers flashed up in various positions before quickly being covered by a white square.

They then had to touch the squares in order of the numbers they were covering from lowest to highest.

Each number was shown for just a fifth of a second but the clever chimp gave the correct answer 90 per cent of the time.

Human opponent Pridmore only managed to give the correct answer a third of the time.

Pridmore is number two in the world ranking list of memory competitions and uses mental images pre-programmed in his mind to memorise a deck of playing cards.

He said: “I have a mental image of an object or a person for each pair of two playing cards pre-programmed in my brain.

“I visualize these objects or people along a mental journey. I’d see a necklace hanging on a bouquet of flowers with an insect flying around it and then the insect would fly off to the next point of my journey so I’m making a story out of 26 different mental pictures.”

When shown footage of the chimp excelling at the task, Pridmore said: “it is extremely impressive for anybody, even a chimp.  “He is doing something which I think is a really great performance even by human standards so I’m sort of forgetting he is not a human being. When I bring that into the equation it makes it overwhelmingly impressive.

“I’d rather not be seen on worldwide television doing worse than a chimpanzee at a memory test. I’ll never live it down at the competitions.”

Scientists believe Ayumu has been able to count since the age of four after learning the skill from his mother.

Professor Tetsuro Matsuzawa from the Kyoto University Primate Research Centre set up the experiment.

He said: “People believe that humans are superior to chimpanzees in any domain of intelligence but no, chimpanzees can be clever in a specific task in comparison to humans. That is the important message.”

The memory test was shown on Channel Five’s The Memory Chimp.