Today on our weekly Fall Through the Cracks Friday feature we bring you the Japanese numbers game Flash Anzan. In this game, participants add up a series of numbers they see only briefly on an imaginary abacus. What makes this game amazing is the speed at which this happens.

In Flash Anzan, 15 numbers are flashed consecutively on a giant screen. Each number is between 100 and 999. The challenge is to add them up.

Simple, right? Except the numbers are flashed so fast you can barely read them.

I was at this year’s championship to see Takeo Sasano, a school clerk in his 30s, break his own world record: he got the correct answer when the numbers were flashed in 1.70 seconds. In the clip below, taken shortly before, the 15 numbers flash in 1.85 seconds. The speed is so fast I doubt you can even read one of the numbers.

 

 

Click here to see a longer clip from 2011, showing Sasano break the world record at 1.80 seconds. Note that the format of the competition is a bit like an arithmetical version of a spelling bee. The remaining contestants are sitting in chairs. The numbers are flashed. The contestants write down their answers and exchange papers for marking. The result is displayed on the screen, and those who got the correct answer stand up.

Flash Anzan was invented a few years ago by an abacus teacher, Yoji Miyamoto, who wanted to design a maths game that was only solvable by calculation with an imaginary abacus, a skill known as anzan.

When the contestant sees the first number he or she instantly visualizes the number on the imaginary abacus. When they see the second number they instantly add it to the number already visualized, and so on. At the end of the game the contestants cannot remember any of the numbers, or the intermediate sums. They only retain the final answer on the imaginary abacus.

Check out the full article on The Guardian website.

Also, make sure to check back frequently next week as PLUS blog will feature new, original content from the 25th Annual PLUS International Conference.

Have a great weekend.