Spaced repetition can allow for infinite recall (2022)
1–10 of 208 posts
Re: Spaced repetition can allow for infinite recall (2022)
#2Fine but what to use in practice. Tried Anki and found its algorithm bit infuriating. SuperMemo is better but thoroughly proprietary.
Re: Spaced repetition can allow for infinite recall (2022)
#3Fine but what to use in practice. Tried Anki and found its algorithm bit infuriating. SuperMemo is better but thoroughly proprietary.
Have you tried Anki since FSRS was introduced? If not, may be worth giving it another shot.
Re: Spaced repetition can allow for infinite recall (2022)
#4This is putting the cart before the horse. No matter how you slice and dice your equations, everyone intuitively understands you can't really store infinite data in your brain. Trying to claim otherwise is simply academic sophistry. No matter how hard you write your proof, it won't make information theory, basic physics, etc go away.
Re: Spaced repetition can allow for infinite recall (2022)
#5Fine but what to use in practice. Tried Anki and found its algorithm bit infuriating. SuperMemo is better but thoroughly proprietary.
Whats wrong with Anki? Works like a charm for me
Re: Spaced repetition can allow for infinite recall (2022)
#6This is putting the cart before the horse. No matter how you slice and dice your equations, everyone intuitively understands you can't really store infinite data in your brain. Trying to claim otherwise is simply academic sophistry. No matter how hard you write your proof, it won't make information theory, basic physics, etc go away.
There have been estimates of how much stuff storytellers from oral traditions could remember, and it’s measured in gigabytes. There are caveats beside the obvious (compressibility) that probably cost you an order of magnitude—stories in oral traditions have evolved for easier recall over the generations—but it’s fair to say that the intrinsic limits of human memory are nowhere near what any of us have deliberately memorized.
Re: Spaced repetition can allow for infinite recall (2022)
#7Fine but what to use in practice. Tried Anki and found its algorithm bit infuriating. SuperMemo is better but thoroughly proprietary.
When building a spaced repetition toy, the most satisfying algorithm I found was:
* Model the forgetting curve as p = 2 ^ (−∆/h) (p = probability of recall, ∆ = time since last review, h = forgetting half-life for a particular card and user) (see https://research.duolingo.com/papers/settles.acl16.pdf)
* Numerically fit this curve to the last ~10 recent reviews of the card by the user to give an estimate for h (the half-life but effectively the intrinsic "difficulty" of the card for that user)
* Schedule the next review of the card at the time when a particular recall probability is reached. This probability should be configurable by the user: >90% for an "easy" session, * Use the "due date" to queue up cards for review. If a user reviews a card _before_ the due date, ensure that the half-life is never reduced after a succesful review. Provide some feedback to the user to suggest they stop the session when there are no pending cards left ("10 more cards due today, 100 cards due tomorrow, 1000 cards due next week")
* Don't schedule the same card twice in a row as this is annoying for the user. If it has just been reviewed and is due next, move it back to second place in the queue.
I found this works well once there are 2 or more reviews of a particular card for a particular user. For scheduling the _second_ review of the card I had to invent a heuristic like: if first review failed, schedule again in 1 minute, if first review passed schedule again tomorrow. However in apps where many users are reviewing the same cards, you could probably build a good model of the difficulty of a card for a user before 2 reviews by considering the performance of other users on that card.
Re: Spaced repetition can allow for infinite recall (2022)
#8Fine but what to use in practice. Tried Anki and found its algorithm bit infuriating. SuperMemo is better but thoroughly proprietary.
I never got try the algorithm - I simply don’t get the UI in spite of all my best efforts. I’m looking for a wanikani like tool, with the same srs , and same excellent and simple ui.
I’ll have a look at supermemo ( I don’t mind paying ).
Re: Spaced repetition can allow for infinite recall (2022)
#9Spaced repetition is an excellent technique, but it shouldn't be the only tool in your learning toolbox.
I found that spaced repetition really works as advertised, with software like Anki. However, it is not really suited at learning large amount of facts and concepts. If it took an hour to review your deck, it's not a good use of your time unless the cards are really high value.
For example, if I want to learn electronics, my time would be better spent on fiddling with circuits and learning through mistakes of implementation. The nice thing is that concepts are interrelated to each other, not discrete and decontextualized that usually happened with utilizing spaced repetition. You get much better value from learning through experimentation and retain it better.
Don't get me wrong, spaced repetition still apply. However, if you can learn something that will last a lifetime, you don't have to repeat it for a long time if ever.
Re: Spaced repetition can allow for infinite recall (2022)
#10I have been wondering about this in the context of being ready for work in the age of LLM‘s. What nobody can deny is that they memorize information at a superhuman level, so it might reduce the value of having done that myself. On the other hand, “couldn’t you just google that“has been an erroneous retort to the value of space repetition for decades, during which I’ve gotten a lot of value out of doing. has been a erroneous retort to the value of space repetition for decades, during which I’ve gotten a lot of value out of doing it.