Be a part of this
The IAM has decided that Abstract Images will be replaced by a new discipline. For this purpose, the IAM had established a team of dedicated people to think about potential replacements. This team has been hard at work in the last few weeks and, after the prize-giving ceremony of the highly successful European Championship 2016 in London, some of these ideas were presented to the athletes on site to check out and practise. This was met with great interest by the athletes who also had a number of new suggestions.
We are writing this to you, yes you, all athletes: We do not want make such an important decision solely by ourselves, we want your feedback. For this purpose, we have created PDFs of many of the new ideas for you to download, print out and practise to see if things work – or not.
As you can see, the new ideas can be structured into a number of categories: Concrete Images and Alphabets for example both take the rules framework of the old Images and replace the data set, Alphanumeric and Password are speed-numbers-like in structure, 100 Words is a race discipline like Speed Cards and Digital Map is something completely new.
The PDFs also contain an explanation of how to train including time and penalty rule. But note that all this is subject to change; variables include amount of data, memo time, penalty for mistakes or not etc… The world is wide open. If you think something does not work like this: Write us and tell us why – and how to make it better. That is the purpose. Every opinion counts and is appreciated.
We have not yet made practice sheets for all of the most interesting ideas we had but we will do that one by one in the next few days. Among those are Face Words (Faces with words, not names below), 50 Images to memorise as fast as possible, an Image-Image connection game (similar to Dates) and more.
Once we have your feedback and your new ideas, while not wanting to rush our decision, we intend to have a solid basis for it at the latest in the beginning of January. That way, athletes will still have enough time to train the finalised event for the IAM exclusive Korean Open in February in Seoul where the new event will be featured as part of the ten disciplines.
Stay tuned, we will launch more ideas and, as explained above, will need your feedback for these too! 🙂
In my opinion, only (new) disciplines that can somehow be connected with everyday life AND that need REAL imagination & memory capacities should be included. I would not appreciate yet another discipline where you need an elaborate encoding system that you have to train endlessly before (ok with cards and numbers). Thus I find Test 02 (Alphanumeric numbers) super (though, of course, a certain extent of “pre-work” could be done here:-); Test 03 (Words) as well, but preferably in columns of 20, not 10.Tests 07 and 08 seem very interesting – but only if an “infinite” number of pictures can be used, i.e. unexpected and different at every new competition, thus making it impossible to encode the images into numbers before (as is the case with “Abstract Images”). Password memo and Digital map I would definitely not include, as, again, they demand a highly sophisticated encoding system before. Hope this helps – and: keep up the good work and spirit that can be felt between the lines :-)!
Best wishes
Luise