What is a PAO system?
PAO is an acronym for “Person - Action - Object”. It’s a system where you associate every number with a certain number of digits with a triplet.
For instance, an item in a 1-digit PAO system may be “Einstein Drawing on a Chalkboard”. “Einstein” being the person, “Drawing” the action and “Chalkboard” the object.
The trick to this system is how numbers are codified from it. Presume the last example was “0”. Let’s give another example, “Micheal Jackson moon-walking on the red carpet”, as “1”.
The whole scene “Einstein drawing on a chalkboard” is codified in pao as 000, whereas the second example is codified as “111”. “Einstein” represents one of the zeroes, “Drawing” the second, and “Chalkboard” the third. This way, you can mix and match. Einstein moon-walking on a chalkboard, for instance, would be “010”.
Usually, however, people do more than 1 digit. 2-digit pao systems are the most common, allowing you to codify any 6-digit number with one scene, with the tradeoff that you have to memorize 100 person-action-object triplets. Luckily, that only turns out to be as hard as memorizing 100 things, instead of 300, since each triplet are intuitively connected. It’s very easy to get “Einstein drawing on a chalkboard” as 000 as long as you remember Einstein; what he does is intuitive by design.
This system has a strength other than just space-efficiency (6 digits with one scene is pretty nice); the images it generates are usually memorable. This is because arbitrarily assigning a known person with a random action and object generates absurd things more often than sensible and intuitive ones.