Skip to main content

REPORT on ASIAN MENSA GATHERING 2016

This year’s gathering had participation from every Asian country Korea (7), Japan (6), Singapore (7), Indonesia (7), Malaysia (7), Australia (5), Philippines (2), Hong Kong (4), and host country China (67).  From the rest of the world, we also had visiting members from U.S. (5) and Europe (Cool. Mensa New Zealand could not come since they had their Annual Gathering on the same date as the AMAG. 

2011 Malaysia

2012 Indonesia

2013 Singapore

2014 Japan

2015 South Korea (Cancelled due to MERS)

2016 China

2017 Australia

2018 Philippines

2019 New Zealand

2020 South Korea

The Pre-event was the Chairman and P.R. Meeting.  Representatives of various Asia Mensa chapters met to discuss issues regarding membership transfers, cross border testing, and shared alternative membership growth strategies several resolutions were made including some that will become formal motions at the upcoming IBD in Japan. 

 This Asia Mensa Gathering saw the inception of Asia Mensa Intelligence Games (AMIG).  This was a team-based event where each country would enter participants to accumulate points toward a final victory.  The events that comprised the games this year were: 1to50, 3x3 Rubik’s cube, Speed Deck, Chess, and Rock-paper-scissors.  1to50 was a popular game found on mobiles where players have to touch the numbers on a 5x5 screen to eliminate them in order as fast as they can.  Speed deck is a main event in World Memory Championships where contestants memorize a randomly arranged deck of cards for as short a time as possible and then restore a second deck with as little mistakes as possible.  The chess event was a round-robin tournament amongst contestants in a 5 min vs 5 min speed chess game.  Rubik’s cube was a single solve of a random 3x3 cube.

 

Event                                                              Champion

1to50                                                              South Korea

Speed Deck                                                    China

Chess                                                              China

Rubik’s Cube                                     Japan

Rock-Paper-Scissors              China

The event featured speakers from a variety of life.  From the business world, there were speakers that shared their experiences from the financial industry, consumer products, computer animation, and robotics.  We also had talks and demonstrations from a nationally recognized Chinese calligrapher, a kung fu master, and a cardistry team.  As this date was near our Chinese mid-autumn’s festival, we scheduled a workshop on making moon cakes.

 Besides the official events, there were a number of Mensa China member led excursions to escape rooms, Pearl River sightseeing, and various eating and drinking excursions of Guangzhou.

 The main event of AMAG was our Gala dinner, which started with a sand art performance using shadows created by sand on a projector and painting scenes of Mensa chapters around Asia.  The next performance was an orchestra that combined western musical instruments with Chinese musical instruments playing various songs.  The finale of the evening was also the finale of AMIG, which was the team-based rock-paper-scissors.  Ten national and regional teams were formed and played a best of 3 out of 5 rounds of paper-rock-scissors.   However, our twist was a Mensa version of the game where each team has a 30sec time limit to plan their strategy against each opponent.  At the end of night, Team China narrowly beat Team Korea 3 vs 2 at the finals and also won the 1st inaugural AMIG competition.

On the last day of the gathering, AMAG closed with some sharing and recognition of the volunteers an invitation to the AMAG 2017 by Mensa Australia.  With the preview of AMAG 2017, we concluded AMAG 2016.  It was a culmination of effort of over 50 members and volunteers working in coordination for over 18 months to put together.  Now our members can relax a little and enjoy other countries’ AMAG before it returns to China 10 years later!