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Spaced repetition systems have gotten better

domenic.me

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Re: Spaced repetition systems have gotten better

#161

Post by ilteris »

uselesswords wrote: post #130
amluto wrote: post #85

My personal peeve about Anki: I don’t like its data model. It seems to me that there ought to be collections of notes (which might be things one would download or generate with an LLM or make yourself or share with friends or students). On top of one or more collections of notes are the sets of cards to want to learn, and they can derive from the notes. This includes, roughly, templates plus some concept of which car…

It’s amazing how every single point you’ve made here is wrong as the other commenter already dove into. On top of that Anki is one of the best documented pieces of open-source software I’ve messed with. If you’re able to program, ChatGPT can basically handle any task you want it too, I data mine the sqllite database regularly for my own insights.

Where does your SQLite db sit? I have been thinking about creating a local database to save and feed into LLM but i have no experience with it

Re: Spaced repetition systems have gotten better

#162

Post by Knork-and-Fife »

I used basically this algorithm in college with the following setup:

Make a word document that lists all the keys to memorize vertically. Save as PDF

Open the PDF in a viewer with annotation tools. Make a clickable note in the margin just next to each key. Write out the value to memorize in the note field.

Cycle through the clickable notes. When you get one right easily, drag the note more to the left in the margin. As you cycle, focus on the ones furthest to the right. If you get one wrong, move it a bit further to the right.

In general the notes will move to the left until you're comfortable with all of them. And the balancing of which ones you need to see and focus on plays out very naturally and you feel in control the whole time.

There are many downsides with this compared to a tool like anki (e.g. I only used it on a laptop), but there was also something about it that just worked really well for me, so I never ended up switching to a different tool. But this was before anki had the similar algorithm described here. Maybe my experience would be different today

Re: Spaced repetition systems have gotten better

#163

Post by ummonk »

uselesswords wrote: post #130
amluto wrote: post #85

My personal peeve about Anki: I don’t like its data model. It seems to me that there ought to be collections of notes (which might be things one would download or generate with an LLM or make yourself or share with friends or students). On top of one or more collections of notes are the sets of cards to want to learn, and they can derive from the notes. This includes, roughly, templates plus some concept of which car…

It’s amazing how every single point you’ve made here is wrong as the other commenter already dove into. On top of that Anki is one of the best documented pieces of open-source software I’ve messed with. If you’re able to program, ChatGPT can basically handle any task you want it too, I data mine the sqllite database regularly for my own insights.

I think there is an argument to be made about the poor learning curve (ironic) for learning how to organize and use Anki

Re: Spaced repetition systems have gotten better

#165

Post by lovestory »

uselesswords wrote: post #130
amluto wrote: post #85

My personal peeve about Anki: I don’t like its data model. It seems to me that there ought to be collections of notes (which might be things one would download or generate with an LLM or make yourself or share with friends or students). On top of one or more collections of notes are the sets of cards to want to learn, and they can derive from the notes. This includes, roughly, templates plus some concept of which car…

It’s amazing how every single point you’ve made here is wrong as the other commenter already dove into. On top of that Anki is one of the best documented pieces of open-source software I’ve messed with. If you’re able to program, ChatGPT can basically handle any task you want it too, I data mine the sqllite database regularly for my own insights.

My personal workflow with memorizing with Anki using LLMs is as follows: Read textbook material first. It's important that you understand what you are learning.You cannot just breakdown information into atoms and expect to understand how it works together (for example: you can learn that there are monounsaturated fats, polyunsaturated fats, saturated fats and trans fats. But without reading beforehand about them from a textbook or other source, you will not understand how they differ (in chemical structure, biological function etc). After I understand the material, I feed LLM the documents (textbooks etc) and give it the following prompt: >I want to generate flashcards from the provided textbook document using the attached PDF. Each flashcard should contain a question and a corresponding answer formatted as pairs in plaintext code block. The structure should be: "Question","Answer" >Extract key concepts, definitions, and explanations from the textbook. If in the text imperial unit system is used, convert it to metric. For mathematical symbols and equations, format them using inline MathJax syntax because I will be importing the copied text to Anki. Ensure questions are clear and concise while answers provide a direct yet comprehensive response.

After the text is generated, I check out the accuracy (in 95% of cases the cards are accurate) and I import them into my decks. The rest is good old school Anki memorizing.

Re: Spaced repetition systems have gotten better

#166

Post by TheDong »

Muromec wrote: post #146
ix101 wrote: post #138

Earlier quoted context omitted.

One way it could grade you automatically is by the speed of flipping the card (or entering the correct answer). If it took less than a second to confirm then evidently it was easy.

Whenever I try to use anki I can't figure what those four buttons actually mean, so I end up with 40 cards that I still can't recall and then the thing happily drops another 10 on top and I just delete the deck or the app. Haven't learned the thing I was trying to learn with it ever. Either I don't understand the algorithm or it doesn't understand me.

My tip is to map the 1-4 difficulties as "wrong, or Depending on what you're learning, you might vary those. For language learning, that works well imo.

Also, make sure to switch to FSRS. The old algorithm defaulted to "again" resetting a card to 0, while "again" in FSRS does show it again, but doesn't reset it back to being effectively new.

If you want to understand the algorithm, read this: https://github.com/open-spaced-repetition/fsrs4anki/wiki/ABC...

Re: Spaced repetition systems have gotten better

#167

Post by Aerroon »

rendaw wrote: post #140
iandanforth wrote: post #63

I wrote "Why Anki Doesn't Work for Me" ( https://medium.com/@iandanforth/why-anki-doesnt-work-for-me-... ) six years ago, which means it was before the new algorithm was implemented. While Anki likely still suffers from all the other issues I mentioned, this directly addresses my point (3). I'm going to have to give it another try and see if the other points are still too much friction, or if the frustration caused b…

I had similar issues... anki would drill me hard while stuff was still in short term memory (single session) then push it back weeks or months before I had any retention. I'd get to it again and it'd be completely gone, queue re-learning it from scratch. I brought it up around the time I tried it and got shouted down. Pretty much every spaced repetition app was treating anki like a holy emissary, so I gave up on spac…

I had a similar experience. In retrospect I felt like I was wasting my time trying to use it. I somehow ended up with memorization sessions that were too easy and impossibly hard and there seemed to be no way to kind of bridge the gap.

Re: Spaced repetition systems have gotten better

#168

Post by tikhonj »

maximus-decimus wrote: post #111
Alex-Programs wrote: post #53

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Spaced repetition is time-optimised , but it isn't self-discipline optimised, nor motivation-optimised. If you're limited by time, it's very efficient, but it drains motivation. If you're anywhere close to being limited by motivation (or, failing that, self-discipline), it just causes burnout and failure. I credit Anki to my success at GCSEs and A Levels despite having a head injury, and I also credit it to me burnin…

I don't understand, wouldn't it be worse for motivation to take longer to achieve the same results?

What's worse for motivation than taking longer?

Boredom?

Feeling like what you're doing is low-quality or superficial?

Doing something artificial for purely external reasons like grades or exams?

Can't speak for anyone else, but for me I would take slower progress over any of these... which makes spaced repetition a hard sell.

Re: Spaced repetition systems have gotten better

#170

Post by TheDong »

JackDanMeier wrote: post #150
TheDong wrote: post #144

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Bullshitting the AI maliciously doesn't matter, if you don't want to study effectively, you won't study effectively, and that's not a problem for the app. > any knowledge rather than specifying that the exact answer should be graded I don't understand what you mean. The important thing is to feed back into the SRS algorithm "How much does this card need to be studied", and if you mean "any knowledge means we can stud…

My understanding of what is important to feedback into the SRS is, was I able to retrieve the memory, and does the representation in my memory align with what I recalled. As an example Term: "What is the capital of France and how many inhabitants does it have?" Correct definition: "Paris, which has 2 000 000 inhabitants." For me there is a difference in not having the answer at all, which falls into "again". But what…

If you want to remember the population correctly, then that isn't a gray zone, that's an "again". That's entirely unambiguous to me, and if you let yourself slide on that, you're hurting yourself.

There's a lot more room for gray zones in language learning, where you might have the french card "doubler" and answer it as "to pass", and then see the actual answer is "1. to overtake, 2. to double", in which case you have to read your heart and decide whether missing the second definition was careless because it's so obvious, or if it merits an "again"

An AI also can't really know, btw, if your answer of "to pass" was "to pass (overtake)" (correct), or "to pass (like a note in class)" (incorrect).

That's not the best example, but there are a ton of ambiguous english words, and you only know in your own heart which meaning you meant.

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