Picture Notation: A Mnemonic System for Chess

[mad10000]

@JohnDen

• “or”, “and”, “structure”, “change”, “search” – how do these work?

As I said, these words are mostly used in plans, or as shortcuts to reduce images/locations/time/effort. Examples:

• If facing three possible rival moves I will answer the same move (and from then on the line will remain the same), I prefer to store them as image1 + image of OR + image2 + image of OR + image3 + my move, etc.

• In known structures I must play a certain plan if the rival plays certain move TOGETHER WITH another one: image1 + image of AND + image2 + my move, etc.

• If part of a plan is to eliminate a certain piece, let’s say Bc8: image of “ELIMINATE” + image of Bc8 (notice that this kind of reminders/objectives are not always followed by my moves, as they can be achieved by various means).

@JohnDen

What do your memory palaces look like?

Now they are linear, regular palaces

@JohnDen

It sounds like you have tried branching structures?

Yes, using in a special way the images of the pieces themselves to arborize/branch the geography of the palace. It is an interesting structure but comparatively suffers from the problems mentioned below (plus others that I cannot mention without spending too much time on the answer)

@JohnDen

I’m experimenting with something like this: “After going through the ticket barriers, you can walk up the platform where you see a match burning a lily, or you can get on the train where you see a machine producing a lily.” This branching structure fits an opening repertoire nicely, but you have to put more thought into its design compared to a normal linear journey.

I’ve been there and, as you have noticed, one has to put more time and effort in coding them. Only when you record in detail the times it takes to encode a certain number of moves and then calculate how much it will take to encode n more, you notice that it is a system that is not scalable beyond a fairly low amount (of course, it depends on what one aspires to).

In addition, the moves are retained for comparatively less time, so they require more frequent rehearsals. Finally, they demand comparatively much more time to recover in real games (you can get to a good opening position but “eating the clock”).

So, although I can’t go into details, now my moves are stored in a manner similar to one of the ways in which tree structures can be represented linearly in programming languages. Incidentally, it is a particular case of an area to which I have devoted a lot of time over the years: the various ways of representing tree structures with memotechnics, about which I may one day have the time to write.

Although @Buddycl uses a different system both in the coding of the moves and in the way of storing them, it is worth reading -if you haven’t already- her/his chess system: Help to memorize numbers long, focused on chess - #2 by InMyMemoryWorld