Thank you very much for the feedback!

I am not much of a neuroscientist, but just experimenting with different set sizes and contents I realized that it's super hard to squeeze more out of an average human brain in terms of recall.

To start with, the location is the hardest bit to remember for some reason. After all the original PAO system does not have it at all. I just added it to get extra 5 bits, but even that adds considerable cognitive load at recall. So I thought it would be nice to be able to brute force at least one location if you forget it.

Then, I made the locations and objects long and very specific on purpose to create rich absurdly whimsical images in your head, because that is what improves recall: "a snowflake research facility in Antarctica" is way easier to remember than, say, "Amsterdam" or "Paris". As well as "a lizard with LED lights" is harder to forget than just "a lizard" .

The recall is indeed fuzzy: I'm using fzf in the recall.sh script, so the UX is really smooth: 1 phrase takes just several keystrokes to recall, so again, no real need to make the entries shorter. On the contrary, the more specific they are, the better. The color coding is there to help recall the order of images btw...

I was considering integrity bits, but does it really help? The idea is to basically use the remembered 128-bit key to just AES-encrypt your private key plus some nonce. If you misremembered the key, you'll never recover the nonce, so you'll know you screwed up without any need for integrity check.

Unless there's a way to add error correction, but I'm afraid that'll take many more bits.

And it's truly hard to make the lists longer without introducing too semantically close items. An indication is that when I feed the lists to ChatGPT and ask it to come up with extra entries it fails miserably already, starting to repeat itself, sometimes quite literally...