Which is considered the “best”, canonical, etc., set of major system images right now? For me, “best” means it scores highly on the following criteria:
Widely used
Few, if any, major system rule overrides (e.g., overriding the major system image for “88” with a “piano”)
Works as input to Person-Action-Object or Verb-Adjective-Noun systems. In other words, the images aren’t a mix of “persons”, “actions”, “objects”, “verbs”, “adjectives”, “nouns”, but, rather, are contained to one of these categories.
The more digits the better (ideally, would have a 10,000 image system, as I’m looking to use single images for historical years 1-2100)
Minimal conflicts if scaling to more digits
The images themslves are good. I.e., meaningful, memorable, simple, unique, etc.
I have found some sets:
Doug’s 1000 Image System: I like his. His .pdf doc is great. But what doesn’t work for me is that his 3-digit images add extra letters (see the discussion in the linked forum post). That means if one tried to scale his system to 4-digits, there would be conflicts.
Wikipedia - Major System: I like that they have images for each of verb, noun, and adjective. But it seems pretty limited, only going up to 100 images.
I am just curious to know whether the Dominic System wouldn’t be a far better option if it’s historical dates you want to recall? With historical dates, you are never going to be needing to go anywhere beyond a four-digit system much beyond the year 2122, if you add 100 years to your current age? I converted from the Major System to the Dominic System as I find that Dominic O’Brien is correct in his hypothesis that people are more memorable than objects and are far stronger than mere objects as people are animate and can move, jump, kick, punch, (add your own action here) which objects can’t do as objects are needing to be acted upon. I’m happy to share my 00-99 cast of characters with you for free. You’ll probably need to adapt some of the characters to others that may be more meaningful to you though?
Historical dates are my main interest. But it would be nice if I had a system which scaled, dealing with other problems well (e.g., remembering credit card numbers). Honestly, I’m just very new to all the memory stuff here. I only have a vague understanding of each system. So I’m really just using rough decision heuristics here. Major system seemed to get the most chatter. So I went that direction. When I first saw the Dominic System, it seemed clunky to me because it used an image compound from a Person-Action (e.g. Andre Aggassi (AA) swinging a cane (CC - Charlie Chaplin) for “1133”). I figured a single noun would be easier to remember. But what you wrote about a P-A being more memorable makes a lot of sense to me. Now I have to rethink this. Hah. That’s good! So happy you shared this with me! This is exactly the kind of info I was looking for. Thanks!
P.S. I would love to see your images. Please share when you have a sec.
I was also considering creating an image for each year based on major historical event. There are good lists around the web for this. The benefit of using this system as that my peg images would have physical significance. The downside is that if, for example, for 1453 I use “The Fall of Constantinople”, it might be tricky to memorably relate events of 1453 in, say, the Americas or Europe, to that image of Constantinople
@zoderfit
I created this topic long time ago about all 000 - 999 images set. (I covered mostly available art of memory forum 000 - 999, and some most famous websites.)
Ben system images as well, you just need to convert ben system images to your system and then the word is yours.
I first translate all words in my native language and then converted in numbers.
well, I told someone about it in art of memory forum, lol he gave me opposite reply.
He said it depends on person what images he is most familiar with.
But don’t you think if many many people are using that specific image than it might be good.
So I divided two sections, first the images that crossed all obstacles and used by many people and second the image In my opinion is the best image.
In the end I looked both image and selected my best images.
Ofcourse as time passes I find new very nice images as well that’s the advantage of letters system. So it’s lifetime update process
If you are going to focus on dates , then personally I use 3 digit system for dates and it’s working very well.
