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| title | chunk | source | category | tags | date_saved | instance |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Andriy Slyusarchuk | 4/7 | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Andriy_Slyusarchuk | reference | science, encyclopedia | 2026-05-05T09:31:06.020817+00:00 | kb-cron |
=== Biography based on Slyusarchuk's own interviews === According to a birth certificate shown by him to journalists, Slyusarchuk was born in the village of Tuğ in the Hadrut Rayon of the Nagorno-Karabakh Autonomous Oblast of the Azerbaijan Soviet Socialist Republic. His father was Mushegyan Vartan Aramovich, an ethnic Armenian. His mother, a Ukrainian, was Ruslana Tykhonovna Slyusarchuk. The Hadrut Rayon civil registry reportedly changed his birth details to his mother's by request in 1984, and he became Andriy Tykhonovych Slyusarchuk. Slyusarchuk said that he graduated from a secondary school in Vinnytsia at the age of nine. His parents, medical professionals (his mother a pediatrician and his father a cardiac surgeon), died in a car accident the year he graduated from secondary school. During the 1980s he was subjected to punitive psychiatry, physically abused and sent to a psychiatric hospital where he was tied to a bed, given psychoactive drugs and injected with sulfozin. When the psychiatrists asked him which books he was reading, Slyusarchuk said that he was reading medical literature and works by Ivan Pavlov and Vladimir Lenin. He was sent to an institution for the mentally-ill children. Slyusarchuk was placed in a Soviet orphanage where he was misunderstood by his teachers and encouraged to conform. When he tried to retrieve his secondary-school certification to enter a higher educational institution, he was labeled mentally ill and punished. At age 11, Slyusarchuk ran away from the orphanage. He taught himself by reading the book Your Abilities, Man, which was given to him by Soviet psychiatrist Andrei Snezhnevsky (who examined him when he was a child). When Slyusarchuk arrived in Moscow he found a Gypsy camp, where he was accepted, fed and taught to beg for money. At the time, he felt the environment was what he needed; he learned about Gypsy hypnotism and its use. After living with the Gypsies for about a year, Slyusarchuk met an employee of the Russian National Research Medical University. They became friends, and through him Slyusarchuk received an appointment with Soviet Minister of Health Yevgeniy Chazov. With Chazov's help, at age 12 Slyusarchuk was admitted for studies at the general-therapy department of the Russian State Medical University. He specialized in neurosurgery under Professor E. I. Gusev (Гусев Е.И.), and his teachers included neurologists V. A. Karlov (Карлов В. А.), A. N. Konovalov and A. M. Vein (Вейн А.М.). Slyusarchuk claimed to have graduated from the Russian National Research Medical University with an honorable diploma at 18, beginning a postgraduate course without the usual internship. His partial self-reported timeline was:
1985 — Entered the 2nd Moscow State Medical University, named after Nikolay Pirogov and now known as the Russian National Research Medical University. 1992 — Entered the St Petersburg University medical psychology faculty. 1998 — Defended his Candidate of Sciences dissertation. 2003 — Defended his Doctor of Sciences dissertation. 2006 — Claimed a world record for memorizing 5,100 digits in 117 seconds, not accepted by international organizations. In June 2009, after claiming a world record for memorizing pi by being able to recite randomly selected sequences from the first 30 million places of pi, Slyusarchuk was congratulated by Ukrainian President Viktor Yuschenko and funding for a research center for the development of Slyusarchuk's methodology was discussed. A December 22 press release from the President of Ukraine reported that Yushchenko and Slyusarchuk had discussed an Institute of Brain Studies to prevent and treat neurological disorders, focusing on social problems such as drug and alcohol abuse. Yushchenko issued a decree providing for the Institute of Brain Studies, for research in neurology, psychiatry, psychology and neurorehabilitation, to be established within one month. Slyusarchuk claimed that his memorization skills were based on mental associations between figures, images, words, numbers (mnemonics) and a photographic memory of everything on which he concentrates. According to the scientists verifying Slyusarchuk's records, "The mnemonic technique can be used by any person". A February 2010 article in the newspaper Novaya reported that Slyusarchuk's student, Alexander Chervonyi, claimed that he could reproduce many of his teacher's memory performances including the recitation of randomly-selected sequences from the first five million decimal places of pi. Slyusarchuk became interested in chess. In April 2011, he defeated the chess program Rybka in an exhibition match in Kyiv while blindfolded. On 26 May, Slyusarchuk said that he memorized 2,600 books on chess in preparation for the game with Rybka. The Trinidad and Tobago Guardian newspaper published an account of Slyusarchuk's victory over Rybka as "Oh, the wonders of gullibility", quoting the Internet-based chess newspaper Chess Today: "What can help [to prove that it was a mystification] are Slyusarchuk’s numerous absurd statements which show his complete ignorance of chess—quite unforgivable for a guy who has read, as is claimed, more than 2000 chess books within several months!" According to Slyusarchuk's friend, journalist Igor Yurchenko, no one argued that Slyusarchuk played chess better than a world champion or a grandmaster; at the time, Slyusarchuk stressed that it was not a chess event but a demonstration of memory. Sponsors bought Slyusarchuk a heavy-duty computer which played many games daily with another comparable computer, and he memorized the strategy of these games. Memorizing thousands of chess games reportedly helped him defeat the Rybka-4; according to Yurchenko, Slyusarchuk just recalled memorized games.