Hi, quick question for anyone using a ‘shadow’-type system for cards. How do you remember whether the final word/image in your entire sequence represents a ‘black-first’ or a ‘red-first’ pair?
Along the way, you can determine this by knowing whether it’s the last word/image at that particular locus point, but the final image always will be, so what other prompt can you use to give you this information? No doubt there are multiple ways of solving this, just curious as to how others do it!
#workinprogress
Two memory palaces, one black, the other red. Given pair, if it begins with red, lands in red, so B = black pair, R = red pair, so: 1B, 2B, 3R, 4R, 5B, etc. So jumping between loci remembering which one is 3rd, 4th in black/red memory palace.
I would absolutely NOT recommend simultaneous use of two memory palaces. This would require allocating a large chunk of your active mental resources to the thing that is supposed to be fully automatic: navigating a simple route. If you have to actively keep track of where you are in both palaces, you’ll be splitting your attention away from both pair recognition and scene creation.
Just grabbing the last two cards as their actual values and entering them first on recall or just inferring them from the image is much simpler.
You can even just grab the value or the suit of the first card of the pair. Assuming you correctly recall all of the other pairs, you’ll be left with just two cards at the end and if you know the first one in the pair you’ll know the second.
Keep in mind this is not a situation that will occur very often at all.
The only way the final pair can trip you up is if it has the same value for both cards AND the suit pair is fully reversible.
So a pair like [7 
] [7 
] (PeaCoCK) could be confused with [7 ] [7 ] (also PeaCoCk.) You wouldn’t be able to infer the order of the 7’s just from your word/image. You’d want to look at that last pair and remember “diamonds.” It would be a good idea to come up with memorable and unique images for each suit. That way if the last pair is a same-value pair, just visualize the image for the suit of the first card. You see a pile of diamonds… You know the last pair starts with the diamond card.
A pair like [7 ] [7 
] (NeCK Guy) can’t be confused. It is a different word from the [7 ] [7 ] pair (CHiCaGo). So even though you’re left with two red 7’s, the word indicates their order.
There 52 possible true pairs per suit combination and 16 suit combinations, but there will never be same-suit pairs in a single deck. So, no worries about having to deal with [7 ] [7 ], or [7 
] [7 ] etc.
The only problem suit combos are the 8 reversible red-blacks:
/
/
/
/
52 possible same-value pairs x 8 problem suit combos = 418 problem pairs. So there are 418 out of 2652 pairs that could present this problem. Thats only about a 16% chance that one of these pairs gets pulled at some point in the set of the 26 pairs that will compose your deck.
But it’s only a problem if it’s pulled as the final pair.
Now, what are the odds that you draw one of these pairs as the last pair in the deck?
I’ll have to get back to you on that haha… I think it is very very unlikely. However many possible deck combos there are divided by however many of those end with a same-value reversible suit pair…
well no 2 memory palaces and one only is not what shadow system implies
“Shadow” is intended to imply that each pair of cards has a primary image and a “shadow” which in its original form represented additional associate images, but can also mean that each suit pair has a primary combo and a related shadow combo, which results in a 2-block (1352 image, two pairs per image) system.
Shadow’s suggested 2-block approach is to use variable image stacking at each loci. A red-first pair signals that you should end the scene at the loci amd move to the next. When you recall your scenes, the last element at each loci represents a red-first pair. There is no mention of multiple palaces, nor is it suggested to use them.
There is a technique that some have called “variable spatial encoding” which involves using placement at the loci to determine the color value, but it is generally not as effective, especially when going for speed.
One palace, one route, variable number of images per scene depending on color. That is how Shadow was built.
Hi @TheHumanTim, thanks for your detailed reply. Everything you said makes sense, and is true as long as I’m memorising a full deck of cards and know which cards I’ve already guessed (and therefore which two remain). It’s more of a problem in this earlier stage of practice, as I’m sometimes doing less than a full deck, which leaves more space for confusion between pairs (e.g. if my last image were a chair, this could be 64 or 64 in my system. If I was only attempting half the deck and none of these cards had been used yet, it could be either).
I’m gonna try this for now: if I end on a black-first pair, do nothing extra. If I end on a red-first pair, add one more thing to that final word/image ‘stack’: a black Magic 8 Ball. This way, my rule that each image stack ends with ‘black’ is maintained, and I have an indication that the last card pair was in fact a red-first pair. Thanks for helping me to think this through! 