Photo: laverrueI blogged last week about how progress in lowering the world record in the 100-meter dash has been extremely slow, even with the improvements in track surfaces, training techniques, steroids, etc. The world record has been lowered at an average of 0.1 percent per year over the last 40 years.
Compare that kind of progress with the revolution that Takeru Kobayashi started in competitive eating. The Nathan’s 4th of July hot dog eating contest is said to have started in 1916 with the winner eating 13 hot dogs that year. By 1978 the record was only up to 17 hot dogs, according to Wikipedia. That rate of progress is not so different than what has been observed in sprinting. By 2000, the record had been stretched to an incredible 25 hot dogs.
In 2001, Kobayashi shows up and eats 50 hot dogs! He doubles the world record. He reigns supreme for six years before Joey Chestnut shows up, and he and Kobayashi both shatter the record with 66 and 63 hot dogs respectively. In this year’s event, Chestnut somehow manages to down 68 hot dogs and buns in 10 minutes.
What is so interesting about this competitive eating example is that, like running, humans have been eating forever. There is no particular reason why people should suddenly be getting so much better at it. A reasonable person might have argued 20 years ago that eating 20 hot dogs in 10 minutes was bumping up against human limitations of stomach size. There was little or no room for improvement. And yet these guys are able to quadruple the world record that stood in 1978. Truly amazing.
Competitive eating was the activity I had in mind when I posed the quiz. As usual, it didn’t take long for a blog reader to get the answer; just a few minutes after the post went up, a reader named Josh wrote “eating hot dogs really fast” to be the first-prize winner.
I also said I would give a prize to the best answer other than competitive eating. There were many great examples given, ranging from mountain climbing to female marathon running to racial integration of the work force to domino tumbling.
But the activity that most captured my awe is something I had never even heard of called “piphilology.” Believe it or not, the point of this activity is to memorize and recite the digits of pi. Before reading further, stop for a moment and take a guess at how many digits of pi people have been able to memorize.
Remarkably, the world record in 1973 stood at 930 digits, according to a page devoted to this activity.
But that was mere child’s play. By 1977, the record was up to 5,050. By 1980, it was 20,013. By 1987, it was 40,000. The current world record is 67,890. It took the gentleman from China over 24 hours to recite those 67,000+ digits.
Now a Ukranian doctor claims to know the first 30 million digits, although he has not yet had the chance to recite them in order. If he went at the pace of recitation that the current record holder used, it would take the doctor over a year to get to the end. It is said, however, that when asked for specific digits he could deliver them.
I’m grateful to blog reader John C. for mentioning this fascinating example. He also wins Freakonomics swag, although perhaps he deserves punishment instead of accolades. I had been feeling pretty good about myself for finally having learned my 16-digit credit card number after roughly a decade of trying (my wife, tellingly, had learned the number many years earlier).
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For all the people who want to cry foul about Usain Bolt, there are just as many accusations about modern competitive eaters. There is the possibility that surgery and/or drugs have allowed them to go beyond the bounds of normal human limits.
Time in the 100m is a different beast compared to both hot dogs and pi. Theoretically, there are no limits on the number of digits of pi one could memorize and the same is true for hot dog eating (though probably much more theoretical). Conversely, the fastest one could run the 100m is bounded by zero seconds. I would argue that making gains in a bounded activity is the more impressive feat.
There was a step-change in hot-dog eating. It was the soaking of the buns. Kobayashi dunks the buns in water so they aren’t dry anymore and much easier to eat. Once that barrier was broken it opened the door for records to keep advancing. He also made it so popular that other people realized that you had to train to eat that much. I think before that people just showed up hungry.
I would guess that things like hotdog eating have exploded because the potential was always there, but no one was capitalizing on it. Kobayashi revolutionized the activity by eating the hotdogs separately from the buns. The change in technique demonstrated that the choke point of progress (pun fully intended) was not in the stomach, but much earlier in the alimentary channel.
But both competitive eating and feats of memorization were stuck at the same limitation for many years: Who wanted to bother training for these things? Why would anyone do it? It needed to be a competition of some sort before large numbers of people would focus effort on figuring out how to do it better.
By comparison, running is something humans have been doing for hundreds of thousands of years, and since survival depended on it, virtually all humans have done it. Our forebears got the basic techniques down long before anyone made a sport out of it.
I think that the competitive eating feat may be somewhat bias by the fact that around 2000 it turned from an activity into an honest to god sport. At some point in the recent past eating contests morphed from carnival side show attraction featuring local overweight individuals to a sport where competitors undergo years of scientific training regimens and then compete full time on a circuit for large amounts of money. There were also many breakthroughs in technique that delivered the same performance boosts as the Fosbury Flop or fiberglass pole vaulting poles.
@Rich:
What makes you think that there are no theoretical limits to hot-dog eating, or pi-memorizing? It’s not as if our bodies have unlimited volume, or our brains unlimited memory. Both are capped at some value – and depending on how you personally represent digits in your head, it could be a very hard bound too. Though I do admit that there seems to be much more leeway in the case of pi-memorizing.
As for the Ukranian doctor, his ability to give digits upon request reminds me of PCP’s from the field of Computational Complexity – but that’s another story altogether.
The hot dog eating can be easily converted to a bounded feat. How long does it take to eat 50 hot dogs? As of 2001 it took 10 minutes. Prior to that, a lot longer. Currently, less. Conversely, we could convert the sprint to “How much distance can be covered in 10 seconds?”
I don’t see a lot of difference.
Now I’m hungry….