Ariadne's Space

Memory Palace Generator with AI

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Inspiration

In today's increasingly digital world, remembering complex passwords, keys, and dates has become progressively more important, and difficult. Unfortunately, the human mind isn't very good at recording random strings of characters with minimal context, which is why over 90% of "Superior Memorizers" (competitive memorizers) use "loci" or "memory palace" techniques. By memorizing objects and locations that represent characters instead of the characters themselves, people can memorize significantly longer strings in a much shorter amount of time.

Alas, creating memory palaces can often be a painful and cumbersome task, especially since most people don't know how to create effective ones. To resolve this, we created Ariadne's Space. Just like in the tales of old, Ariadne will help you escape the most challenging labyrinth of all: the one that exists only in your mind.

What it does

Ariadne's Space uses over 35 unique phrases, photos, and transitions to create a funny, memorable story to help you memorize even the most cumbersome of character idioms. Whether you're trying to memorize digits of Pi, important historical dates, geographical coordinates, or even cryptocurrency wallet keys, Ariadne will take you on an unforgettable adventure with everything from macaroons and cute pugs to igloos and black holes.

If you love our software so much that our 35 unique mini-stories simply aren't enough for you, you can even turn on AI generation on the home page. Our software will then use an intelligent neural network (GPT2) to actively generate transitions between rooms, instead of using our pre-written ones. See the AI feature in action here: https://youtu.be/Q44mhBirgZc

Our software currently supports memorization of phrases that contain any of the characters [A-Z, ., ]. The maximum phrase length is practically infinite, and if you turn on AI generation, you'll even get a practically infinite list of unique room transitions as well!

How we built it

We used HTML and CSS for the user interface. This application code is written in JavaScript.

The AI transitions are generated by a Python program inside a Docker container on Google Cloud Run. It uses the Hugging Face Transformers library and GPT-2 to generate creative transitions, which it serves to the frontend over HTTP.

The domain name is registered with Domain.com.

Challenges we ran into

The hardest part of this project was getting a neural language model to output novel but somewhat-sensible transitions. We got better results by using a larger model, lowering the temperature, and feeding in our own examples as a prompt.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

We are proud of the GPT-2 implementation on the website. We are also proud of the website's descriptions and non GPT-2 transitions. We also spent significant time on the dynamic UI of the website.

What we learned

We learned about GPT-2 and google cloud computing services. While researching memory palaces, we also learned about the psychology of memory, including which colors help our brains better remember and the benefits using a memory palace provides, especially to those involved in fierce memory competitions.

What's next for Ariadne's Space

Ideally, we would have added an upload feature to pair with our download feature so that users could pick up where they left off with the same transition, whether randomly generated from the manually created list or generated by the GPT-2 AI.

Currently, the website is optimized for chrome. The website could be expanded to also work on other browser and mobile platforms.

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