[HN Gopher] Spaced repetition can allow for infinite recall
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Spaced repetition can allow for infinite recall
Author : efavdb
Score : 130 points
Date : 2022-08-08 00:12 UTC (22 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (www.efavdb.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.efavdb.com)
| cortesoft wrote:
| This 'proof' seems a little suspect. It assumes that the rules
| they have discovered hold for all situations. Even if they have
| tested a large number of facts to remember, there is no reason to
| believe their isn't some threshold where it doesn't hold anymore.
|
| Also, they seem to be holding this learning technique like it is
| a mathematical fact of the universe. I am not an expert, but
| nothing in the human brain works that consistently. I can't
| imagine every single person in the world can learn equally well
| with this technique.
|
| Although this is likely some form of satire, because there is no
| way anyone could seriously think the brain works like this.
| krychu wrote:
| Shameless plug for a little tool I wrote to learn by repetition
| on the command line: https://github.com/krychu/lrn
|
| I use it whenever I have a few minutes of downtime, no fancy
| state persistence between sessions.
| dls2016 wrote:
| I was anti-memorization until I went back to graduate school for
| mathematics. I had forgotten (or never learned) a lot of things
| needed to pass qualifying exams. At some point I ran across the
| spaced repetition idea (maybe from the Wired SuperMemo article
| [0]) and I gave it a try. I ended up using it to memorize large
| portions of baby Rudin and Munkres' Topology, as well as some
| algebra and a bunch of qualifying exam questions.
|
| The qualifying exams were difficult until I reached some
| "critical mass" of knowledge. Then I could regurgitate proofs and
| even attack novel problems easily.
|
| There's an analogy here somewhere to the "leetcode" style of
| software engineer interview. On one hand qualifying exams and
| leetcode questions are a stupid gatekeeping mechanism, but on the
| other hand the best researchers/engineers I know have a huge
| number of facts and examples memorized and ready at their
| fingertips. I didn't think I needed to do so, but perhaps there
| is something to suffering through the rote memorization phase to
| make what comes next that much easier.
|
| [0] https://www.wired.com/2008/04/ff-wozniak/
| ren_engineer wrote:
| I'd be really interested to see some research into integrating
| spaced repetition into our actual education system. Almost
| everything I see about it is adults learning, I wonder how much
| we could speed up primary school education considering so much
| of the "base" stuff needed to advance is rote memorization
| anyway
|
| seems like countries should be investing money in this,
| potentially trillions in unlocked economic potential by
| improving and speeding up education. I think I read something
| like 20-30% of medical school students use SRS, yet only a
| fraction of the general population uses it. Insane to me that
| we have a tool like this and almost nothing is being done to
| improve adoption.
| pessimizer wrote:
| Hundreds of millions of the world's kids were remote learning
| for up to a year and a half. If there was any opportunity to
| develop real tools to help with remote learning, it was then,
| but we ended up with nothing, and remote learning still
| sucks.
|
| If anybody is going to integrate memory techniques into a
| curriculum, it'll probably be some Silicon Valley charter.
| kazinator wrote:
| I remember the exact point in my life when I realized how much
| difference rote memorization makes.
|
| I had the opportunity to write some MC68000 assembly code, at a
| time which was not too long after having written a complete
| emulator for it in C. Writing the emulator required me becoming
| familiar with every single instruction in all of its nuances,
| and exactly what they all do.
|
| So, having that behind me, I sat down to write this code and it
| was like wow ... I could just spew the code without having to
| look anything up. It was so easy!
| therein wrote:
| > I remember the exact point in my life when I realized how
| much difference rote memorization makes.
|
| I suspect this might have something to do with neurological
| development. At least in my experience. Something about
| memory and recollection "clicked" (not a skill but more a
| capacity) at a really adult age for me.
|
| Almost similar to being taught calculus after not knowing how
| most physics formula are derived and then looking back in
| confusion how you struggled with a straightforward thing.
| snowpiercer wrote:
| Don't you think you actually did well in your exams because you
| really understood it and not because you blindly memorized it ?
| nomel wrote:
| I imagine it's possible that they are related. In my life,
| I've only witnessed it as a required for being an expert at
| any topic: experience and memorized knowledge, of a topic.
| ozim wrote:
| That is false dichotomy that is running around.
|
| To really understand something first you blindly memorize -
| but that is not enough, once you do examples and exercises
| using what you blindly memorized you get to understand things
| quicker, a lot quicker.
|
| Not memorizing stuff and figuring things as you go is mostly
| recipe for disappointment.
|
| Like in chess - people think that chess players are somehow
| super intelligent - but being super intelligent without rote
| memorization of loads of chess settings will not help winning
| grand master title.
| Silverback_VII wrote:
| >"To really understand something first you blindly
| memorize"
|
| Because of this sort of advice ppl equate memorization with
| "not understanding" and cramming.
|
| Never memorize things you don't understand.
| orangepurple wrote:
| They must be performed in lock step. Fully agree.
| borroka wrote:
| It similar to the question, "if you could do just one
| exercise, what would you do?" And you have all these
| answers, it is the squat, no, it is the deadlift, please
| guys it is the power clean. It is not a useful question
| because you will never be in the position of choosing just
| one exercise to be done for the next month, year or decade.
|
| Memorization is important and understanding is important,
| and the two are not in any conflict whatsoever.
| buscoquadnary wrote:
| There's actually an interesting section of the book
| "Moonwalking with Einstein" where it talks about a study
| was done on chess masters where they showed them the board
| in positions that would be impossible under the rules and
| suddenly the master chess players didn't do all that much
| better than random people.
|
| The suggestion in the book was that really Grandmasters
| have spent so much time practicing, that they have
| memorized the game and the board to a certain extant that
| allows them to more easily handle the board and all the
| pieces on it cognitively.
| Karrot_Kream wrote:
| I've picked up a lot of (human) languages over my life, and
| I've used SRS to great effect (I started on JMemorize, a now
| defunct Java app.) I have a simple strategy:
|
| 1. Read a text
|
| 2. Lookup unknown word/grammatical pattern
|
| 3. Create a flashcard for it
|
| 4. Apply SRS
|
| and it works great. I've also tried to use other people's
| Anki decks and they've never worked particularly well.
| Personally engaging with the material is still the
| _prerequisite_ for memorizing it, but memorizing means you
| don 't need to struggle to figure out basic concepts
| constantly and can instead move onto the higher level of
| meaning.
|
| I've used SRS over the years for many, many things. I've used
| it for memorizing divisibility rules, used it for annoying
| math lemmas, used it for data structures, and more. Each of
| the time I've attempted the material by myself and then
| turned my knowledge/engagement into a flashcard. I've even
| considered using it to learn tools like Blender so I can dial
| in workflows.
| pessimizer wrote:
| I've really understood a lot of stuff that I've since
| completely forgotten. For example, if you don't speak your
| native language for 20 years, you'll be surprised how hard it
| is to find any of it when you need it.
| k__ wrote:
| Oh, could you go into more detail about math and memoizantion?
|
| What did you do?
|
| I had the impression, these techniques only work well for
| languages, but I really would love to get better at math.
| mkl wrote:
| Have a look at this article by Michael Nielsen:
| https://cognitivemedium.com/srs-mathematics
|
| Old HN discussion:
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18895613
|
| Or this one: https://cronokirby.com/posts/2021/02/spaced-
| repetition-for-m...
|
| Hasn't been on HN before so I just posted it:
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32390730
| xkfm wrote:
| That Supermemo article in Wired hooked me. I still remember
| where I was when I read it and the feeling of reading it. I
| still use Supermemo daily, and it's one of the programs keeping
| on Windows. Anki (and every other SRS program I've tried) just
| doesn't compare as soon as you move beyond a list of
| flashcards.
|
| That said, having used Supermemo for over a decade at this
| point, the hardest thing about SRS is deciding what's actually
| worth reviewing for a long period of time. I delete (really
| remove from repetitions) cards from my collection almost on a
| daily basis.
|
| There's a lot of stuff that seems really important that I just
| didn't care about after even three months.
|
| Supermemo's incremental reading basically lets you schedule
| chunks of text or images (alleged video too) like a flashcard
| from Anki. So, instead of bookmarking articles and never
| reading them, I can put them into Supermemo and know I'll
| eventually review it.
|
| It basically counts as a separate type of flashcard, but all
| your reviews are mixed by default. So on a typical day, I'll
| have maybe 20 flashcards to review, and then another 10-20
| articles.
|
| Supermemo saves where you last were reading, so when I get
| bored of an article, I just hit next and go to the next one.
| Eventually, you'll process an article down to individual
| flashcards like you'd put in Anki, or remove it from your
| review process altogether. Also, you can just leave the entire
| article in there if you like rereading it.
| TeeMassive wrote:
| Is Supermemo only available as a SaaS?
| orangepurple wrote:
| No it's primarily an awful Delphi for Windows desktop
| application that is extremely fragile.
|
| But once you know how to "hold it correctly" it will be
| your companion for life.
|
| I run it in a virtual machine with all its legacy
| dependencies like IE. Forget about running it on Wine, it
| barely works on any version of Windows (lol)
| TremendousJudge wrote:
| If actually using it has this huge friction, how do you
| manage to use it every day? I always have a hard time
| creating habits out things that are hard to "start" doing
| every time.
| orangepurple wrote:
| I don't. I developed my own spaced repetition software
| from first principles based on the latest research :D
| samatman wrote:
| I would love a link dump if you have that handy and don't
| mind. I'm working on something with a spaced repetition
| component.
| klipt wrote:
| Is your code open source? Seems like Anki could do with
| some competition.
| wizofaus wrote:
| What's https://www.supermemo.com/ then? I just signed up
| to give it a go (requires CC #, but free for a month).
| Still haven't found good spaced repetition vocab learning
| site that works well for me.
| jan_Inkepa wrote:
| https://super-memo.com/ is the software that's being
| talked about.
| wizofaus wrote:
| Ah OK, though I'm still curious how there can also be an
| apparently unrelated online offering at supermemo.com.
| FWIW, from the very brief experience I've had so far I'm
| not super impressed, but I'll try sticking with it for at
| least the month of the free trial.
| Karrot_Kream wrote:
| Yeah I agree. Anki has a failure mode for me that I
| eventually accumulate > 5000 flash cards and a review session
| can take an hour or more. Knowing what to review is really
| difficult. I'll give Supermemo a shot, I've always heard of
| it as the gold standard but never tried it.
| Silverback_VII wrote:
| Memorization is powerful only if you memorize the right stuff
| like Machiavelli's Prince instead of a phone book.
|
| Incremental reading (supermemo 18) to dissect books is even
| better I think.
| cptcobalt wrote:
| I see this argument as semi-fallacious, since it's really asking
| "can you recall infinite things on an infinite timescale using
| this method"? Sure, the math might add up, but humans are
| reliably fallible. I do agree, from practice, that practicing
| spaced repetition can increase the breadth of knowledge beyond
| that of "casual learning", but I've seen my brain fail on aged
| entries too.
|
| Nicky Case's intro to spaced repetition is pretty stellar, both
| as a crash course and the reasoning behind it:
| https://ncase.me/remember/
| jacb wrote:
| More than semi-fallacious - the math doesn't add up, because
| you run into the Bekenstein bound, which limits how much
| information you can pack into a volume.
| jerf wrote:
| This is why I don't use spaced repetition. The danger of
| becoming a black hole is just too high. Forgetting things is
| well known to be highly evolutionary advantageous, because
| all the critters that remember everything and turned into
| black holes stopped reproducing. Very dangerous stuff to play
| with.
| jacb wrote:
| Ha! Certainly none of us will get anywhere close to this
| bound, no matter how much time we log in Anki. But the OP
| asked "Would an infinitely-long-lived, but forgetful person
| be able to recall an infinite number of facts using this
| method?", and the answer is a surprising "no, you turn into
| a black hole".
| ben_w wrote:
| Sometimes even just _one_ piece of knowledge can turn you
| into a black hole. It's why nobody remembers every digit
| of Graham's (phone) number.
|
| ;)
| jrussino wrote:
| I know we're all playing around here, but surely the
| answer must be that there's a limit rooted in the
| specific biological/chemical implementation of memory in
| the brain that our hypothetical "infinitely-long-lived,
| but forgetful person" would hit before the Bekenstein
| bound (probably long before) and therefore it's
| impossible to turn a brain into a black hole via that
| mechanism.
| orangepurple wrote:
| The more you learn the more you gain the ability to encode
| new facts with fewer "bits." Thanks to associative memory.
| Adults have an advantage in learning in this regard.
| makeset wrote:
| Tragic really how smart people know perfectly well that you
| shouldn't exercise if you don't want to accidentally turn
| into a grotesque muscle freak, but rarely use the same
| caution in brain exercise.
| shkkmo wrote:
| The argument is wholely fallacious and the author knows it and
| is just being silly. The entire argument is based on
| assumptions that only hold for smallish numbers of items. It we
| get to larger finite numbers, such as the number of possible
| states of a human brain, those assumptions are clearly false.
| Silverback_VII wrote:
| there are only a limited amount of things you can memorize
| because your lifetime is also limited. Piotr Wozniak the creator
| of supermemo, the first spaced repetition program, talks about it
| on his site:
| https://supermemo.guru/wiki/How_much_knowledge_can_human_bra...
|
| this guy is a genius in my opinion.
| orangepurple wrote:
| I am in no way affiliated with the guy but you should read the
| seminal papers published by John R. Anderson.
|
| This guy has been in this game since the 70s
|
| Carnegie Mellon University Professor of Psychology and Computer
| Science
|
| http://act-r.psy.cmu.edu/peoplepages/ja/
| tpoacher wrote:
| I'm a fan of spaced repetition too and have incorporated Anki in
| my life in more ways than simple memorization.
|
| But calling it "infinite recall" is a bit misleading. Improved
| long-term retention at the cost of minimal unintrusive prompting
| is probably closer.
| comfypotato wrote:
| The article is a joke proving how an immortal person could get
| infinite recall with spaced repetition.
| cehrlich wrote:
| I've been using Anki for language learning and it's a superpower.
| After just over two years I passed an exam that requires a
| passive vocabulary of about 10,000 words. Other people who
| grinded harder than me have managed it even faster, some in under
| a year.
|
| However one big mistake people make is to think an SRS helps you
| learn. That's not true. It helps you not forget things you've
| already learned. You still need some real world interaction with
| the material.
| borroka wrote:
| >> It helps you not forget things you've already learned.
|
| The argument is quite weak when we discuss learning words in a
| foreign language. You learn that lunch is "almuerzo" in
| Spanish, but is it learning or just memorization/association?
| To me the lines are blurred, even at first sight of the word.
|
| I used Anki myself to learn foreign languages and it is
| tremendously effective for words and short sentences too. I use
| it also for words in my mother tongue, and it made be much more
| articulate than I used to be.
| _dain_ wrote:
| >You learn that lunch is "almuerzo" in Spanish, but is it
| learning or just memorization/association? To me the lines
| are blurred, even at first sight of the word.
|
| I think there's a difference. "Almuerzo" -> "al muerzo", I
| know "al" means "the", from Arabic, I look up the etymology,
| the "muerzo" is from Latin "morsus", from which we get
| "morsel" in English. Mnemonic: "the morsel". Then I can guess
| that the form of the verb is almorzar, which is indeed the
| case. Even learning a simple word embeds and thickens a web
| of associations in one's mind. SRS strengthens this, makes it
| scale better.
| dhosek wrote:
| It kind of reminds me of what I used to say about 9-ball pool:
| You can play with an infinite number of players but not everyone
| will get a turn.
| buscoquadnary wrote:
| I'll just throw out I am a big fan of spaced repetition I highly
| recommend it to everyone. For those complaining about "infinite
| recall" you aren't wrong, the pioneer of this movement Piotr
| Wozniak, even has an article on his wiki
| (https://supermemo.guru/wiki/Piotr_Wozniak) about how the upper
| bound of languages you can learn fluently in a lifetime is
| probably somewhere near 5. But the point isn't to remember
| everything forever, the purpose is to help you learn better.
|
| My flow right now for learning things is.
|
| 1. Find sources copy and paste large swathes of revelevant text
| and images.
|
| 2. Re-read the copy and pasted text and create a detailed summary
| of it in my own words.
|
| 3. Come back a few hours or day later and summarize the summary.
|
| 4. Use this as the basis for cards to load into Anki.
|
| It isn't about building a massive repository of facts, and you
| can do plenty with just steps 1-3 without ever using Spaced
| Repetition, but the reason I fell in love with spaced repetition
| and have jumped on it so heavily is that I've done steps 1-3 with
| a lot of information and subjects, and over time have forgotten
| all but the most basic things about them. This makes me feel as
| if part of my time or life was wasted, because if I have to
| revist something again latter like Sorting Algorithms it feels
| like starting over. Whereas things I have started to use spaced
| repetition with, I retain the fundamentals the "outline" of the
| subject for much longer, and if I have to revisit it I feel much
| more familiar because to paraphrase Piotr Wozniak. The things we
| remember well are things that are well located/connected within
| our knowledge tree.
|
| For those IT people out there as well the other thing spaced
| repetition and especially Anki is super useful for is learning
| how to use your tools more effectively because it helps you to
| remember those features and tricks that you don't use often but
| super speed things up. For example I used grep for a long time, I
| often found myself having to hit up the man page, or the DDG if I
| needed to do something unusual, or more often I'd end up trying
| to cobble something together with the tools I had. I reviewed a
| "most useful flags" in grep page a few months back and decided to
| Ankify it. I am now an order of magnitude more proficient with
| grep because I can quickly recall the flag or option I need to
| provide to do something wonky with it when I need to, simply
| because I remember a relatively obscure feature, that I don't use
| often and would've forgotten otherwise.
|
| Finally in conclusion
|
| The 4 states that made up the Austro-Hungarian Empire were
| Boznia-Herzgovania, Croatia-Slavonia, The Kingdom of Hungry and
| Cieslenthia. Because sometimes memorizing one or two random facts
| just makes life more interesting.
| tiborsaas wrote:
| Finally, a mathematical proof to take as many pictures as
| possible is a good idea :)
| dinobones wrote:
| TLDR I know how to use latex and took calc 2, I want to look
| smart on the internet.
| barking_biscuit wrote:
| I mean sure. The trouble is in order to keep the review time per
| day fixed you need to vary the rate at which you introduce new
| facts, and as time goes on the interval between when you can
| afford to introduce new facts will grow to be infinite.
|
| The model also doesn't account for how you feel about doing this
| activity. This includes the pain of not doing reviews for several
| days and then having to catch up. The probability you eventually
| throw in the towel is also a function of how useful you're
| finding the activity, which in this case since we've opted to
| keep the per-day study time as fixed will likely be when the
| interval that you are required to wait before you can add a new
| fact becomes so large you are routinely bothered by occurrences
| where you encounter a fact you wanted to put into your SRS but
| didn't have the bandwidth to.
|
| Source: input 35 new vocab a day into Anki while learning
| Japanese a decade ago and grew my vocab deck to 18000+ cards.
| Reviews would take several hours a day, and at one point I
| stopped adding new words to try and wait for the daily review
| load to go down. When it never did despite this, I just deleted
| the entire thing and say fuck it.
| allenu wrote:
| That growing backlog is a big issue with this type of
| scheduling. I think it's one of those almost "unexpected" side-
| effects of spaced repetition. I mean, if you did the math up
| front, you should know generally how busy you're going to be
| over the next few weeks based on how many cards you're
| reviewing per day, how many new ones are coming, and how you're
| scoring with each card, but it's not really something people
| do, nor does the UI show you that.
|
| I wrote my own spaced repetition app (see my profile) and one
| thing I experimented with is an "ETA" function which goes
| through your deck and tells you how long before you learn
| everything "well enough", where "well enough" just means the
| intervals between all cards is at least some fixed threshold,
| like one month. I was surprised that even with a few hundred
| cards and a fixed number of cards reviewed per day, it would
| still take a few months.
|
| I haven't added the ETA feature yet, but if I do, I think I
| would need to make sure to show the user how adding new cards
| affects that target date, and also how reviewing more cards a
| day or fewer cards a day affects it. I think there's a way to
| design a nice UI so users feel like they are in control of that
| end date so they can choose if it's worth it to add new cards
| or not.
|
| I think a spaced repetition app should also make "falling
| behind" not feel catastrophic. I think memorizing a smaller set
| of facts consistently is better than trying to memorize a
| larger set and then giving up, and an app's UI can probably
| help to that end.
| ceeplusplus wrote:
| Not quite. The review intervals increase exponentially, so if
| you stop adding new cards the workload quickly goes to single
| digits per day in a few months.
|
| 35 a day is excessive for sure. Even with foreign language
| stuff which is the lowest time to solve per card, I limit
| myself to 10 new cards/day. Math problems 2 new/day. Daily
| workload ends up around 50-100 cards, which is very manageable.
| You do need to be consistent though.
| martindbp wrote:
| Yeah, I've got 9000 reviews waiting for me in my old Chinese
| Anki deck, at some point you always fall off the wagon. I've
| changed my mind several times on SRS going back and forth, and
| my conclusion is that, for language, I think it's better to
| split your time with 90% on consuming meaningful input and 10%
| SRS, because learning in context with real content that you're
| interested in allows you to encode your memories much more
| efficiently. The problem with pairing available SRS systems
| with consuming real content is that they don't take into
| account "natural" repetitions, e.g. when you encountered a word
| in a movie outside the SRS, so they tend to underestimate how
| well you know a word. But also since "natural" repetitions are
| baked into the SRS model via parameters that fit the "average",
| it also tends to overestimate your knowledge of a lot of other
| items. Combined, you just have a very inefficient schedule that
| takes too much of your time for too little gain
| orangepurple wrote:
| A prioritized queue of stuff to learn may be a better
| solution than staring at "over 9000" things to review. Such a
| queue would mean you simply bite off as much as you can chew
| every day and don't perpetually fall behind, assuming the
| priority queue has a small degree of randomness and is
| recomputed daily based on the decay rate of all modeled
| facts. Do you agree?
| mikkergp wrote:
| I know this is just a joke, but there was an interesting Radiolab
| on memory and forgetting. It posited that forgetting is an active
| process, and analysis a person who was disabled in such a way
| that their forgetting process didn't work led to some very
| undesirable outcomes:
|
| https://radiolab.org/episodes/91569-memory-and-forgetting
| rideontime wrote:
| Sincere question: is this satire?
| NotTameAntelope wrote:
| Honestly yeah I think it's a form of satire[0], which IMO takes
| nothing away from the joke.
|
| Satire is fun! And I think the folks taking the math seriously
| are probably in on the joke.
|
| [0] or whatever brand of comedy "imagine a cow approximates to
| an oblong sphere" is. "This is strictly satire" is not a hill I
| must die on.
| kelseyfrog wrote:
| This is false if memory's are stored physically in the brain.
| Unless there is an increase in brain volume, this process will
| eventually hit the Bekenstein bound. I don't care if the upper
| bound is "effectively infinite," that's not what the proof
| claimed.
| Invictus0 wrote:
| Undoubtedly the worst comment on all of hacker news
| kelseyfrog wrote:
| Truly honored.
| orangepurple wrote:
| Neural connections are pruned regularly
| marcodiego wrote:
| > "effectively infinite,"
|
| This is what I have been thinking. If whatever you can remember
| is bigger than all experiences and lessons you could remember,
| then your memory is effectively infinite. I don't know if
| having a continuous effectively infinite memory is good or bad.
| As someone who play the classical guitar, having a better
| memory would do wonders for me.
| [deleted]
| monktastic1 wrote:
| Proofs rely on assumptions. In this case, they state outright:
|
| > We first posit that the number of days T that a fact can be
| retained before it needs to be reviewed grows as a power-law in
| s, the number of times it's been reviewed so far, ...
|
| Obviously this _assumption_ will be false in our physical
| universe, but that doesn 't make the proof itself invalid
| (edited).
| kazinator wrote:
| In logic, the soundness of a proof in fact has to do with its
| interpretation in some universe of discourse. To be sound,
| the argument has to be deductively valid, and its premises
| have to have true interpretations in the chosen world where
| it is applied.
|
| Here we have a valid mathematical argument which is unsound
| in this world, where its assumptions do not hold up.
| monktastic1 wrote:
| You're right. I should have said invalid rather than
| unsound. I still don't see the point of the criticism,
| however. Lots of interesting things can be learned by
| starting from approximations to actual reality.
| vntok wrote:
| > I don't care if the upper bound is "effectively infinite,"
| that's not what the proof claimed.
|
| Very interesting. Do you typically process all claims as
| literally as you just did for this one, notably when you're
| interacting with people outside of the Internet? In which case,
| do most people react positively to your behaviour, or do they
| get annoyed because "you know what I meant"?
| kelseyfrog wrote:
| Internet "well actually," culture made me this way. I preempt
| rebuttals I'm not interested in.
| _dain_ wrote:
| I don't think you're actually a real frog.
| kazinator wrote:
| It's cute math, but doesn't take into account the inexplicable
| differences between the retention of seemingly similar facts.
| Some items stick very well, whereas others suffer from lapses.
|
| In my Ankid ecks, I have items that have 10+ year intervals. And
| some, which were introduced at around the same time as those,
| which have intervals in months, beaten down by lapses.
|
| Anyone who thinks that some simple math leads to infinite recall
| has not suddenly lapsed on a card whose interval had reached 7
| years.
| orangepurple wrote:
| I don't recommend allowing Anki items to have an interval of
| over one year because the crude SM-2 algorithm does not capture
| the per-item effect of exponential decay in memory. Multiplying
| interval lengths by per-item ease factors is suboptimal and not
| the same. Unlike, for instance, ACT-R, which unfortunately has
| no good publicly available user interface. A good
| implementation of a neural memory fact model will track
| strengths of associative memories in addition to the per-item
| exponential forgetting curve. Keep the Anki intervals capped at
| one year until something better comes along.
| kazinator wrote:
| Problem is it seems you're then throwing under the bus all
| those items you recall perfectly well that have 6+ year
| intervals, which don't require yearly review. Arguably, you
| could just retire those; but then sometimes they lapse, as I
| noted: how do you decide what to retire?
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