The online competition in Mental Calculation was held on Saturday 15th August 2020, in partnership with the Mind Sports Olympiad, as an activity for human calculators of all ages, while the main events have been cancelled for a year.
29 competitors from 13 countries and aged between 10 and 57 years old took part, with very high levels of ability demonstrated!
Congratulations especially to the three winners:
🥇 Neelakantha Bhanu Prakesh (India)
🥈 Mohammed El-Mir (Lebanon)
🥉 Asmita Pal (UAE)
As it happens, these three competitors also achieved the top three places in the same order for the qualifying round, for a consistently great performance throughout.
Highlights
All participants were asked to show a video feed of themselves and their screen during the competition, and there were some creative solutions! Yosra (Iran) placed a huge mirror from her house behind her so that the reflection showed her screen, and Ufuoma (Nigeria) competed the entire time holding his phone camera in one hand.
When Neelakantha Bhanu won with a clear margin of 65 points, 57 of these were from the penultimate question, calculating the cube root of 353 to an amazing 19 digits of accuracy. The team (Daniel and Yusnier) were so surprised that they required him perform another cube root (also answered correctly) but questions remain about his method.
Results
As the first rounds took much longer than expected, the judges replaced the original format (two semi-finals and six final rounds) with one big final, to keep the contest a manageable length, especially for the participants from India.
Results from the Final:
[167] Neelakantha Bhanu
[102] Mohammad El-Mir
[100] Asmita Pal
[96] Aaryan Shukla
[92] Yosra Soleimani
[89] Archita Pal
[79] Kaloyan Gesheva
[70] Kaede Kodachi
[70] Sreenidhi Neermanvi
[61] Shashank Jain*
[60] Gunishka Mukesh Jain
[56] Joshua Spring*
[47] Raghav Krishna
[47] Pascal Kaul*
+ fifteen other participants not in the final
Note: contestants marked with an asterisk achieved their highest score in the round one so this result has been used instead.
Extra Information
Two useful files to download: the Question Categories (PDF) and a Sample Round One (PowerPoint). Please note the answer to Q11 is incorrect! You can also read about the actual format of the competition.
The event was streamed live to the Mind Sports Olympiad’s channel, but unfortunately viewers who joined at certain intervals were redirected to other events such as chess and Quoridor, so apologies for that, and thanks to Etan from the MSO who got it changed back.
Finally, many thanks from me (Daniel) for everyone who was involved as a participant and made this contest a reality! Thanks to the viewers for watching, for the Mind Sports Olympiad for including us in their program this year, and to Yusnier Viera (inventor of Hectoc, and the fastest Human Calendar) for working with me on the event, presenting the questions, calculating the scores, and supporting all of the participants.
The Junior Mental Calculation Online Contest is happening in September, and I hope to see many readers next year as a competitor in the rescheduled calculation competitions of 2021!