
Want to Remember Everything You'll Ever Learn? Surrender to This Algorithm  - mshafrir
http://www.wired.com/medtech/health/magazine/16-05/ff_wozniak?currentPage=all
======
btilly
In grad school I managed to take advantage of the pacing effect in an
educational setting. I was teaching linear algebra. What I did was make the
homework incremental - 1/3 of homework on today's material, 1/3 on the
previous week, and 1/3 anything in the course. Those thirds were in increasing
order of difficulty.

I also started every class with a question/answer period. The rules were
simple, the questioning will last at least 10 minutes, and you don't want me
to ask the questions. :-) Anything that had come up in the questions that
seemed to be a point of confusion was sure to be added to the next homework
set.

I won't go into what else I did with that class, but the end result is worth
thinking about. First note that I gave a ridiculously hard final. Other grad
students who saw it thought that the class would bomb. Secondly they aced the
test. What do I mean by aced? Well I had a bonus question which fellow grad
students thought nobody would get. 70% of the class got that question, and a
good fraction were over 100% on the test. So they must have studied hard,
right? Nope. I ran into some students several months later. They told me that
they tried to study for the final and stopped after a few minutes because it
was useless, they knew everything. And several months later they still knew
much of the material cold!

The thing is that none of what I did was very radical. The principles have
been known for a century. Psychologists have been trying to get people to
listen for that long. I learned about it in the 80s from a university course I
watched on TV. (British Columbia had a TV channel devoted to lectures for
correspondence courses.)

Yet, despite how dramatic the effects are, nobody listens and nobody takes
advantage of it.

~~~
tocomment
If you made this story into a blog post, people would listen. (I'm actually
serious, it's an interesting story and a lot of people might benefit from
hearing more of the details and the thought process behind it.

~~~
Alex3917
"If you made this story into a blog post, people would listen."

That's what I hate about people. What makes people pay attention isn't the
ideas themselves, but whether it looks like you worked hard in writing it.
I've made comments on HN that no one paid any attention to, and then turned
them into blog posts and had them get to the top of Reddit or Digg or
whatever. Exact same ideas, all I did was visually change the text to make it
look more professionally laid out, and carefully rework some of the phrasing
to make it sound better to the ear. (Plus add a couple really good first
sentences and a good headline.)

I've found that if you actually leave a couple minor mistakes in your blog
post it gets more votes, because it look like you're thinking at the edge of
your intellectual ability, and people like that. It's the exact same thing
Seth said in his post about the Chris Bliss Diss video:

[http://sethgodin.typepad.com/seths_blog/2006/03/its_how_you_...](http://sethgodin.typepad.com/seths_blog/2006/03/its_how_you_tel.html)

"Today, I got a video, featuring Jason, who just might be the best juggler I
have ever seen. Same music, similar routine. Except... five balls. Not three,
five. Infinitely more difficult. And Jason makes it look easy.

The thing is, even though I know how much more difficult Jason's routine is
and how skilled he is, the very ease of his delivery makes it less likely an
audience would give him that same ovation. Interesting how important effort
seems to be."

~~~
briancooley
* all I did was visually change the text to make it look more professionally laid out, and carefully rework some of the phrasing to make it sound better to the ear. (Plus add a couple really good first sentences and a good headline.)*

Those changes are non-trivial. Layout and writing style are integral
components in the user interface for comprehending text.

~~~
joe_the_user
Yes,

There are a lot of hn news posts I've made that I think I could make into blog
posts or even articles. But I can't claim they already are in a form people
will pay attention to.

For example, the posts I'm most proud of generally get few mods whereas
simplistic but irrefutable objections to some other story tend to get the
highest mods. But that's logical. People just aren't reading the ten or fifty
posts on a paper to find the gems. They might read the first that way if
you're lucky. Otherwise, they are more likely to skim. Even on the web, the
writer has to present their ideas so they are accessible.

(And here I go again. This post will get far less mods than statements like
"where's your evidence")

------
GiraffeNecktie
This article is written as if SuperMemo were the only software that uses
spaced repetition (SRS) algorithms for learning. Actually there are quite a
number of other programs out there including some that are free or open
source. I've used SuperMemo for years on my Palm and found it very useful for
learning French but the software (at least for the Palm) hasn't been updated
for many years and doesn't give the user any control whatsoever over how the
program is used. For learning Chinese I've moved to a commercial product
called Pleco on the Palm which is basically a dictionary but also has
elaborate SRS functionality, it's really light years ahead of SuperMemo. Other
more generic SRS programs include Anki and Mnemosyne. Unlike SuperMemo, it's
easy to migrate your flashcards among these other applications. One other
point, SRS is a huge help to learning vocabulary but learning words is only
one part of mastering a language.

~~~
cesare
Thanks. I was just wondering if there was a similar open source project.

Anki: <http://ichi2.net/anki/>

Wikipedia entry about this technique:
<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spaced_repetition>

~~~
sandGorgon
Mnemosyne is actually very good

<http://www.mnemosyne-proj.org/>

it works on Win, Mac and Linux - written in Python

~~~
bjelkeman-again
This should really be made into a web service. Where all the new card decks
are shared for free. I think it could become a very powerful collaborative
environment.

~~~
r7000
Hi! It has been by a few people including me. My site is here:
<http://flashcarddb.com>

FlashcardDB allows a choice between two spaced repetition algorithms:
Supermemo's SM-2 (like Anki, Mnemosyne) or the Leitner System. New card decks
are shared for free.

------
nwinter
This is what we do at <http://www.skritter.com> for Chinese and Japanese.
Spaced repetition is definitely still in the geek realm, though. Even after
automating almost everything (vocab creation, addition, even grading), there
are still a lot of people who don't want to practice on the computer, or
aren't as interested in efficiency of the learning process. I think as spaced
repetition moves away from raw SRS like SuperMemo and toward integration with
classrooms, textbooks, and other software that provides content as well, we
will start to see more widespread adoption and recognition of its power.

There was a recent thread here about whether SRS will evolve to appeal to non-
programmers: [http://globalmaverick.org/archives/169-repetitio-est-
mater-s...](http://globalmaverick.org/archives/169-repetitio-est-mater-
studiorum)

------
cesare
Once you've finished the article, there's a lot of reading material on the
SuperMemo website:

<http://www.supermemo.com/english/contents.htm#Articles>

Really interesting stuff. The website and the software user interface (at
least judging from the screenshots) are terrible, though.

~~~
billswift
You beat to it. I've had the site on my favorites list for months, it's got
more information than the article, but it wasn't anywhere near convincing
enough to get me to actually spend any money. Maybe I'll go through it again
and see.

~~~
cesare
Have you tried Anki? (it's open source, see GiraffeNecktie comment). I've just
downloaded it. There are also some decks shared by people (mostly for natural
languages) that you can download from the app itself.

~~~
peregrine
And GRE vocabulary, I don't even need to take the GRE(maybe) but I think I
will study these, improve my vocabulary.

------
klipt
There's at least one maker of language courses (Pimsleur) which use the pacing
effect. Unfortunately they're audio only, which at least for me isn't nearly
as effective as a combination of audio and writing.

~~~
jwecker
I've used these- really brilliant. Takes the pacing effect but makes it
conversational so it really seems to flow. The trade-off, of course, is that
it has no idea how well _you_ have memorized various things (i.e., being
prerecorded audio, it is generalized).

------
cgs
One thing I've never bothered to do is learn an API of X language really well.
Because, I thought, I'll just look up whatever I don't know. But I'm
constantly stopping to look things up and it really slows me down. Now I'm
beginning to think there's really some value in having a strong command of an
API. Has anyone tried using an SRS tool to help with this? Or is it simply a
matter of not having enough experience with X language?

~~~
chimariko
I am not sure about SRS for learning API of a language. However I have
recently started to use mind maps for that. Whenever I come across a new
language or library I take an A4 and a pen and put down all basic concepts. It
helps to grasp the big picture of the system and to see the interconnections
of different blocks of code. I prefer mind maps to the standard linear up-down
way of writing stuff down because the schematic representation utilized in
mind mapping eases the twist between the way information is stored on paper
and (presumably) in the human memory.

All in all I find spending some time on studying docs useful in contrast to
the pure work-by-doing approach.

------
tocomment
Is there someone I can try this out for free? Are there ready made flashcards
for something useful to learn?

~~~
tigerthink
As mentioned above, Anki and Supermemo are two free implementations. As for
ready-made flashcards, here are some I made for a calculus class:

<http://www.spicyelephant.com/decks/523>
<http://www.spicyelephant.com/decks/577>
<http://www.spicyelephant.com/decks/659>

You probably have to register for an account if you want the site to apply
supermemo-type techniques. I don't recommend using the site in the long term
because it will eventually force you to register for $20.

~~~
gwern
Supermemo isn't really free - maybe you meant 'Anki & Mnemosyne'? That's the
big 2 in the Free SRS space.

~~~
tigerthink
Right. Sorry.

------
rgrieselhuber
There is a company based here in Japan called Smart.fm (formerly iKnow) made
up of really great people doing similar work.

------
idigthought
Is there a good os x and iphone application for this? I'm looking particularly
for one that supports images and LaTeX.

~~~
gwern
There are a number of SRS clones already produced for the iPhone in the store
(Mnemosyne, I understand, works fine on OS X); there's also a Mnemosyne clone
in early development for the iPhone.

------
gfodor
iPhone version coming out in a few weeks. (I emailed him about this.)

