19 ms·

To Remember Everything You Learn, Surrender to This Algorithm (2008)

740 points by colinprince 8y ago

e19293001 8y ago
I just found out that you can use SuperMemo without a computer. https://www.supermemo.com/articles/paper.htm https://www.supermemo.com/articles/paper.htm I thought it would be interesting for me to do this method while I'm studying a scientific paper. Any thoughts?
- pavelpokorny 8y ago
  I've used the paper method in the beginnings of my English study and it worked well for me. SuperMemo was a really great tool and I liked it very much. Managed to keep using it for maybe 10 years, and I'm still sorry that I've stopped when the program and its community were in decline. But the method and algorithm remain the best and it's great to see it's used in modern applications - not just Anki but perhaps in all major language teaching apps. The fact that this article made it to HN front page speaks for itself. As for using it for scientific paper study - depends what you expect from it. Spaced repetition is great for remembering and retention of facts. When I'm reading a scientifi paper, I rather struggle with the basic understanding of it :)
  - andai 8y ago
    Ahh, but if you could better remember everything you have understood, surely that would help with understanding the next paper!
- z0k 8y ago
  There are some useful tips for reading papers using Anki here: http://augmentingcognition.com/ltm.html http://augmentingcognition.com/ltm.html Scroll down to the heading "Using Anki to thoroughly read a research paper in an unfamiliar field".
subsubsub 8y ago
> "To Remember Everything You Learn, Surrender to This Algorithm" > "The winter sun sets in mid-afternoon in Kolobrzeg, Poland, but the early twilight does not deter people from taking their regular outdoor promenade" I find titles promising a specific piece of useful information combined with longform, author storyline based content to be one of the most fustrating things about reading traditional journalism on the internet. A form of bait and switch.
- ai_ia 8y ago
  Same here also it did feel like it was an sponsored ad for the company.
- richforrester 8y ago
  "this one algorithm" -> 6000+ words No proper headings. To hell with that. I won't ever know what they're on about.
- deleted 8y ago
  [deleted]
- ajuc 8y ago
  The algorithm (version 2, there are newer versions too). https://www.supermemo.com/english/ol/sm2.htm https://www.supermemo.com/english/ol/sm2.htm
- koolba 8y ago
  You mean like every search result for “X recipe”?
  - nkozyra 8y ago
    I feel like it must be some SEO requirement - because otherwise who wants a rambling tale of the time someone's gammy took them down to the shore to experience the beach life, finding adventures and making new friends and then paragraphs later ok here's the recipe for Maple bourbon glazed salmon you wanted
- bufferoverflow 8y ago
btrettel 8y ago
I used Anki (similar to SuperMemo) to study for my PhD qualifiers and it definitely helped. I kept up the cards for a while after that, adding more and more. I'm convinced I would have not passed the measure theoretic probability theory class I took without spaced repetition software. The software also proved very useful when I would have a technical idea and had no reference on me as I could remember the details of many results. It seemed to accelerate my thoughts in a way too by removing the delay to look up some information. Eventually, I did not have the time or need to keep reviewing the cards, so I stopped. But I intend to pick it up again after cleaning up the cards after my PhD. I highly recommend the software. One piece of advice: I treat these flash cards as basically fast tests that trigger a review if you fail. I recommend this approach as many people seem to think flash cards can only be definitions. Some of my cards are definitions, some are short problems, some are proofs, etc. The definitions are unit tests. Problems and proofs are integration tests. Both are necessary.
- ginnungagap 8y ago
  I can also recommend Anki, I used it to improve my German vocabulary and it was rather helpful! I study maths and I never thought about using flashcards for it, but it's a cool idea, I might try it out!
  - philbarr 8y ago
    Are there sets of cards for known problems, such as learning language X, or is making the cards part of the learning process?
    - kd5bjo 8y ago
      Both; success rates are significantly lower if you use somebody else’s cards. Seeing the card you made reminds you of making the card, which helps you remember the information you were trying to capture at the time.
    - joshvm 8y ago
      Languages, yes. There are plenty of pre-made decks for learning the basics of pretty much all the major languages. Beyond that it's a mixed bag. There are usually decks for things like verbs and common nouns. Getting comprehension practice (e.g. grammar) is harder because that only comes with ingesting lots of material from different places (otherwise you tend to 'overfit' and rote learn the flashcards). Making your own cards is more effective than using someone else's deck, simply because it's tailored to you. For anything other than a language, unless it's pop trivia, you should try to make your own cards. You typically have to work methodically through the thing you're trying to learn, which can help a lot. If you go with a pre-made deck then you're relying on what someone else thinks you ought to know.
femto 8y ago
It would make sense if you could get electronic textbooks which are already in the question/answer form required by spaced repetition software, ready to "load and learn". Rather than reading a traditional textbook, you would take an equivalent question/answer set and learn it by spaced repetition. Do such things exist? Following on from that, maybe such question answer sets could be automatically generated from the semantic web? A simple example would be a question/answer set about capital cities, but could one pick an arbitrary subject and manufacture a list of questions about it?
- ai_ia 8y ago
  > It would make sense if you could get electronic textbooks which are already in the question/answer form required by spaced repetition software, ready to "load and learn". Rather than reading a traditional textbook, you would take an equivalent question/answer set and learn it by spaced repetition. Do such things exist? I am working to solve exactly this. A form of learning where the learning happens due to interaction between a bot and a human. Machine teaching humans basically. Been working for over 20 months. Will be releasing within two weeks. :)
  - ipsum2 8y ago
    I'm guessing your username is relevant :). Using AI for intelligence amplification? Excited to hear about your project.
    - ai_ia 8y ago
      Haha. Thanks. The project doesn't use AI at all. I figured out that you don't really require the system to pass turing test in order to develop tutoring system. It can assist in clever ways. That being said, Primer ( the tutoring system ) will teach ML/DL/RL courses. For more info, you can subscribe to the mailing list here, https://tinyletter.com/primerlabs/ https://tinyletter.com/primerlabs/. I will post within two weeks.
  - Aduket 8y ago
    keep me updated please, good luck.
1024core 8y ago
> how to become a genius: You must clarify your goals, gain knowledge through spaced repetition, preserve health, work steadily, minimize stress, refuse interruption, and never resist sleep when tired.
- Scarblac 8y ago
  That sounds quite good actually. Now how to do that consistently...
  - comboy 8y ago
    First you must convince yourself that becoming a genius (whatever that means) is more important to you than whatever it is that you are currently doing. Then you just act based on your worldview, as you always do.
- cJ0th 8y ago
  Maybe it's just me who after years at uni is sick of viewing everything from this impoverished academic point of view but I think these statements are not helpful at all. People worship advice/knowledge these days and totally forget about the doing. The statement does not deny that actually doing stuff is important - "work steadily". However, these are just empty words to someone who tries to become a genius by hitting the books first. My advice (yes, I do see the irony here) in this age would be to postpone seeking advice or reading about a topic as long as possible. As a result, your common sense sharpens and you may even come up with fresh, creative ideas that others perhaps didn't have.
  - rimliu 8y ago
    > postpone seeking advice or reading about > a topic as long as possible Oh gosh, the number of inefficient solutions, horrible architectures, brain-dead encryption systems I saw, because of the people who did not bother to open a book. To come up with creative solutions you need to have a base for said creativity. I.e. to connect the dots in original way you need to have the dots already. I have nor proof, but I suspect that the number of useful solutions created by people who know nothing about the field is close to zero. Somehow I doubt one would see much further when instead of climbing onto the shoulders of giants they prefer to stay in the pit of their own ignorance.
xkfm 8y ago
This is by far my favorite piece of software I've ever purchased (and one that's keeping me on Windows). It's very obtuse to use and not really user friendly at all unless you're just making flashcards with it. I get the impression that it's somewhat dogfooding taken to the extreme, and it's almost as if they're selling it as a side project. There are so many random features like the sleep tracker (https://www.supermemo.com/help/sleep.htm https://www.supermemo.com/help/sleep.htm) that don't really make much sense to have but are there anyway. There's also a web version if you just want flashcards that's mainly focused on language learning. They sell some courses and you can add your own cards too. The biggest selling point for me is the incremental reading (https://www.supermemo.com/help/read.htm https://www.supermemo.com/help/read.htm) feature. It's the only way I can manage to keep track of so many articles that I find interesting, and is vastly superior to leaving hundreds of tabs open or a bunch of bookmarks I'll never look at. It's superior to instapaper,readitlater etc because I don't have to decide what to read when I open the app, and I don't have to worry about forgetting about the article if I stop in the middle of it. If I see anything remotely interesting, I just chuck it in Supermemo, and I'll see it eventually. If it's really important, I'll set its priority higher so I see the article sooner. If I'm doing research on something and have 15 tabs open, all 15 tabs go into Supermemo, and will eventually get whittled down into flashcards. Start with an article -> extracts -> smaller extracts -> cloze deleted flashcard. Long comment chains on Hacker News? Supermemo. Youtube videos? Supermemo. Email? Supermemo. Images? Supermemo. I check my RSS feeds once or twice a week, grab all the interesting articles, import into supermemo, and I'm done. Supermemo for me replaces: Evernote/OneNote, most bookmarks, Anki, and various todo list apps. If I just wanted to make flashcards from set material, I'd honestly use Anki, because of the mobile apps. It's really easy to do a few repetitions when you have downtime through the day. Every person I've shown this app too doesn't really care about it, and I don't really know why. If I had to guess, it's probably because the UI is horrific. I can effortlessly keep up with so much information, and it takes an hour or two out of my day.
- miranda_rights 8y ago
  I've heard fantastic things about SuperMemo but don't have a Windows machine - and don't plan on buying one. It's extremely unfortunate there's no Mac version.
Arun2009 8y ago
> "To this day," Bjork says, "most people think about forgetting as decay, that memories are like footprints in the sand that gradually fade away. But that has been disproved by a lot of research. The memory appears to be gone because you can't recall it, but we can prove that it's still there. For instance, you can still recognize a 'forgotten' item in a group. Yes, without continued use, things become inaccessible. But they are not gone." This was quite eye opening to me when I first heard of it. Apparently, our long term memory is virtually limitless. You never truly lose something you once had learned well. Another fact about memory that I found equally interesting: memory is not a "thing" but a process. When you recall something, you are actually reconstructing the memory from various factors associated with it, pretty much like how a paleontologist might reconstruct the image of a dinosaur from fossil remains.
- colordrops 8y ago
  It seems to me that there are two gates, and they move with age, and the rate at which they move differs from person to person. The first gate is the time until losing something from associative memory. The second gate is losing the memory completely. Yes, this does happen, and it happens to everyone. But the quote still has some validity in that many things we think we forgot are still buried deep inside.
- tzs 8y ago
  > This was quite eye opening to me when I first heard of it. Apparently, our long term memory is virtually limitless. You never truly lose something you once had learned well. There are startling experiments in the area. Take a large set of pictures (it has been done with sets of up to 20000 at least). Take half those pictures and show them to subjects, one at a time, giving them a few seconds to look at each picture. Later, take the set of pictures you showed them, and pair each with one of the pictures you did not show them. Shuffle that set of picture pairs, and then show the subject the pairs sequentially, asking them for each which picture of the pair they have seen before. On a test that used 20000 pictures, with the recognition test a day and half later, subjects got 80% right. If instead people had just been asked to recall as many pictures as they could, most people only be able to recall a tiny fraction of them. Here are a couple of papers in this area: https://www.gwern.net/docs/spacedrepetition/1973-standing.pdf https://www.gwern.net/docs/spacedrepetition/1973-standing.pd... https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/18787113 https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/18787113 > Another fact about memory that I found equally interesting: memory is not a "thing" but a process. When you recall something, you are actually reconstructing the memory from various factors associated with it, pretty much like how a paleontologist might reconstruct the image of a dinosaur from fossil remains This is sort of illustrated by a thing called the Baker/baker paradox. Show people a photograph of someone, with a label that says "BAKER" attached. Tell half the subjects that the label means that the person is a baker, and tell the other half that the label means his name is Baker. Later, show the subjects the photo but with the label removed, and ask them what the missing label had said. The people given the job story will be much more successful at remembering this than the people given the name story. The name "Baker" has very little associated with it in most people's minds, whereas the job "baker" brings up associations with all kinds of delicious treats, and maybe childhood memories of wonderful smells permeating the house as your mother baked in the kitchen. So when you are told the photo is of a baker, all of those things that baking is associated with in your mind get associated with the photo, and you've got more to grab onto mentally when trying to recall the label. These may be weak associations, but they still beat out the name "baker" which for most people has no extra associations. Anyway, we don't just reconstruct the memory to recall it. We also might edit it and save the changes. This has serious implications for the criminal justice system when dealing with human witnesses. If an investigator interviewing the witness says anything that suggests events happened different than the way the witness remembers them, there is a danger the witness' memory will change to match the interviewer's version. The witness will not know this is happening, and genuinely believe that the updated memory is what really happened. These aren't always minor updates...they can be big, like in a confrontation changing who drew a gun and started shooting. I don't have a link, but I've read of experiments where researchers got parents or older siblings of some adult subjects to mention at a family gathering some amusing/embarrassing incident from the subject's childhood--a totally made up incident. Later, the researchers found excuses to question the subjects about that incident, and the subjects "remembered" it, and not only the details that had been supplied in the made up story. They had filled in complete details about the incident and the things leading up to it and following it.
known 8y ago
Feynman technique https://qz.com/849256/how-to-master-a-new-subject/ https://qz.com/849256/how-to-master-a-new-subject/
- lihaciudaniel 8y ago
  I guess Feynman technique needs to be used in a record time. I find it very time consuming, I just do it after learning something but I don't want to spend too much time on it.
AJRF 8y ago
TL;DR: The "algorithm" is spaced repetition. God this was a frustrating article to read. Spaced repetition does work though, I used a tool called Anki which has a free online sync service and free apps for every platform (bar iOS, it costs £15 on that platform).
- e19293001 8y ago
  From Anki manual[0]: Internally, Anki’s spaced repetition system is based on an older version of the SuperMemo algorithm called SM2 [0] - https://apps.ankiweb.net/docs/manual.html https://apps.ankiweb.net/docs/manual.html
- arendtio 8y ago
  > God this was a frustrating article to read. Exactly what I thought. Some parts (10%) are very interesting, but it contains so much stuff I don't want to remember...
- mcguire 8y ago
  It's a profile of the SuperMemo creators, not a how-to.
praptak 8y ago
The TLDR: the algorithm is spaced repetition. Notable apps that implement it are SuperMemo (this one got it popular) and Anki (the free one).
- megous 8y ago
  Next article will be 6000 words about how moderate exercise improves general well being.
thestephen 8y ago
This type of learning, combined with applying the knowledge learned, is easily one of the biggest lifehacks I've encountered. Growing up, I (falsely) internalized that I somehow had a hard time learning languages. However, with the help of Anki, that has an algorithm based on SuperMemo, I realized that this wasn't the case - just that the traditional textbook methods weren't for me when it comes to cramming in "arbitrary" information. While living in Japan, I used Anki to supplement my recognition of kanji. I averaged roughly 7 minutes of studies for a year, internalizing the meanings and readings of roughly 1000 characters with a 95% retention rate. Judging from my peers, the only ones that managed to pick up this volume were those that studied the language full-time. Of course, they learned the language overall at a much higher level than I did - this methodology purely focused on the recognition aspect. Naturally, I got to put the characters to use living in the country, and I also spent time making up mnemonics for each character. Your mileage may vary.
- pbhjpbhj 8y ago
  I'm curious what your mnemonics are like, could you give an example or two? I'm not a student of Japanese, but AIUI there are pictographs and ideographs amongst the characters, presumably these are effectively already mnemonics?
  - yorwba 8y ago
    That might have been true of the original bone script characters, but over the millennia they have been stylized beyond recognition, and many new characters were created. Modern Japanese or Chinese is about as mnemonic as the typical icon set used in a GUI application. However, most characters are composed of a few common components, called radicals, which can sometimes provide hints about the meaning. For example, the Chinese words 海 "sea", 波浪 "wave" and 渴 "thirsty" all contain the water radical ⺡. Similarly for 丝绸 "silk" and 缠绕 "wind around", which contain the thread radical ⺓. Personally, I don't use any mnemonics, but I know someone who does, and he'd assigned each radical a memorable representation (e.g. the thread corresponds to Spiderman) and then he had a story linking a word to the components, so that 丝绸 would be about two Spidermen, one of which wraps himself in silk to use it as a ghost costume.
zhdc1 8y ago
Obligatory shout out to Learn with Texts - http://lwt.sourceforge.net/ http://lwt.sourceforge.net/ - which interfaces with Anki.
rdfi 8y ago
I've been doing spaced repetition with Anki since 2013. I wrote about my experience here: https://www.blinkingcaret.com/2016/05/04/hack-your-brain-learn-faster-better/ https://www.blinkingcaret.com/2016/05/04/hack-your-brain-lea... If I could only give one advice to someone about improving their learning skills, it would be to learn about spaced repetition
growlist 8y ago
I use Anki. It really does work. A few things I found: 1. It takes discipline to understand the material properly before attempting to just bang it all in Anki, but learning directly from Anki can be miserable, so it really is best to try to grasp it fully before going near Anki 2. Creating the right questions can be difficult - sometimes I found myself able to regurgitate the answer but other tests proved I didn't really understand the meaning. One way to approach this is to test different aspects of the answer, or to add the inverse of the question. Still even if you don't grasp the meaning properly just having a rote answer in your head can improve your capability 3. Life often gets in the way of the discipline required!
roi 8y ago
The best and most practical introduction to spaced repetition is Michael Nielsen's Augmenting Long-term Memory (http://augmentingcognition.com/ltm.html http://augmentingcognition.com/ltm.html), already discussed in https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17460513 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17460513.
Mbioguy 8y ago
Few people have tried Anki (a free alternative to SuperMemo). Even fewer have tried its add-ons, which is where it truly shines! Vanilla Anki is mostly good for text flashcarding, with the phone app helpful for making use of those little bits of downtime throughout the day. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=c-4xOe79epU&list=PL3MozITKTz5YFHDGB19ypxcYfJ1ITk_6o https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=c-4xOe79epU&list=PL3MozITKTz... https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QzBoDe3PgAc&list=PL3MozITKTz5Y9owI163AJMYqKwhFrTKcT https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QzBoDe3PgAc&list=PL3MozITKTz... Glutanimate has taken Anki to a whole new level. He created a painless UI for occluding any part of an image and making Anki flashcards out of it (Image Occlusion Enhanced). I used it to efficiently create and memorize thousands of anatomy flashcards. Ordered lists can be a real pain to memorize, but when not missing steps is crucial (as it is for medical OSCEs), Cloze Overlapper has worked very well. Anki lets you share your decks with others, and medical students have collaboratively created very high quality study decks for studying for the various STEP exams. To be honest, I was always a fairly mediocre student. Big-picture concepts and figuring things out on the fly, no prob. But I've always struggled to nail down bits of information long-term or learn sequential information, meaning calc and ochem required inordinate amounts of time. No longer the case. Spaced repetition plus visual/text/auditory learning is a recipe for success. The possibilities here should not be underestimated. Folks on Hacker News have talked about the value of information commons, and this right here is the next best example behind Wikipedia I have ever encountered. While quality collaborative decks exist for things like medical school, learning languages, and more, none exist specifically for the program I am in (PA school). I am currently creating my own with the goal of it being the core of a quality collaborative deck. I am using Gephi to spatially organize concept maps for diagnoses complete with incidence and strength of associations, when such information is available. I then export these maps to Anki, use Visual Occlusion Enhanced to block out the information I want to recall, and voila: time-efficient first-time learning and long-term retention.
- gbacon 8y ago
  I built an Anki deck to study for the FAA instrument written test and the oral exam portion of the instrument practical test. Tips and best practices: * Effective learning: Twenty rules of formulating knowledge[0] * A list of Anki tips and suggestions that [a medical student] wrote[1] * Anki Guide for Medical Students[2] * How to make high quality Anki cards quickly[3] * Anki Tips: What I Learned Making 10,000 Flashcards[4] [0]: https://www.supermemo.com/en/articles/20rules https://www.supermemo.com/en/articles/20rules [1]: https://www.reddit.com/r/medicalschool/comments/4ocdyb/a_list_of_anki_tips_and_suggestions_that_i_wrote/?st=iwlfns6h&sh=945cacd4 https://www.reddit.com/r/medicalschool/comments/4ocdyb/a_lis... [2]: https://drwillbe.blogspot.com/2011/08/anki-guide-for-medical-students.html https://drwillbe.blogspot.com/2011/08/anki-guide-for-medical... [3]: https://managingmedicine.org/2013/05/14/how-to-make-high-quality-anki-cards-quickly/ https://managingmedicine.org/2013/05/14/how-to-make-high-qua... [4]: http://rs.io/anki-tips/ http://rs.io/anki-tips/
Terretta 8y ago
For language learning, consider Pimsleur, who discovered ‘the algo’ previously: “Graduated Interval Recall - Dr. Pimsleur’s research on memory was perhaps one of his most revolutionary achievements. He discovered that if learners were reminded of new words at gradually increasing intervals, each time they would remember longer than the time before. He documented the optimal spacing for information to move from short-term into long-term, or permanent, memory. This theory is at the base of all the Pimsleur programs.” https://www.pimsleur.com/the-pimsleur-method https://www.pimsleur.com/the-pimsleur-method
- idoescompooters 8y ago
  I'm a big fan of the Living Language package.
Waterluvian 8y ago
I heard a doctor online once say, "watch one, do one, teach one." He was talking about medical procedures but I've focused on the "teach one" part to much success in software.
deleted 8y ago
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neuralk 8y ago
Spaced repetition software? A requisite post is gwern's excellent and comprehensive article on them https://www.gwern.net/Spaced-repetition https://www.gwern.net/Spaced-repetition
jjcc 8y ago
It's quite interesting that Anki(It's a Japanese 暗记 for those who don't know where the name comes from) is mentioned a few times but no body mention "Memory palace"[1] and "Major system"[2] yet. Both methods try to hack some features/bugs of our brains built by mother nature during million years of her evolutionary development. Most memory athletes use some variation of these methods to achieve astonishing performance. There's a Dr. Yep can remember a 65 thousands of English word and the locations (i.e. page number and the sequence on that page) of each word on a Chinese/English dictionary. The trick is investing some time to build a personalized memory system, then use the system to remember other things like passport number, credit card , phones etc. It might not be attractive to most people because today we have smart phone to help us. But for learning new knowledge, combination of both space repetition and memory system is quite interesting. Here's what I did: I use a Anki alternative called Memrise[3] to build a Major system. (I also have Anki installed but just prefer Memrise). Then I use Major system to review the concepts I've learned. Major system here is the equivalent of Anki as a tool for short term place holder of space repetition, not directly used for learning. I found brain Anki is better than smartphone Anki/Memrise although I built former Anki with later Anki. Come on fellow hackers, hacking your brain is very rewarding [1]https://artofmemory.com/wiki/Method_of_Loci https://artofmemory.com/wiki/Method_of_Loci [2]https://artofmemory.com/wiki/Major_System https://artofmemory.com/wiki/Major_System [3]https://www.memrise.com/en/ https://www.memrise.com/en/
- 0xdeadbeefbabe 8y ago
  https://artofmemory.com/wiki/Person-Action-Object_(PAO)_System https://artofmemory.com/wiki/Person-Action-Object_(PAO)_Syst... I considered working on this, but I'm just not excited enough about remembering. Thanks google. Oh and Einstein said (according to Shaq) you should never remember what you can go lookup.
  - michaelcampbell 8y ago
    The beauty of the human memory system is not whether or not you can remember a thing, but the correlations and relationships between them. A convenient lookup mechanism doesn't help there.
eadmund 8y ago
As soon as I read this, I wondered if someone had written some elisp to do it. Sure enough, org-drill[0] exists and implements spaced-repetition learning. In true emacs fashion, it actually implements three different algorithms which one can choose from! Just looking at it briefly, it appears to be pretty nice. 0: https://orgmode.org/worg/org-contrib/org-drill.html https://orgmode.org/worg/org-contrib/org-drill.html
- gnomewascool 8y ago
  While I'm a pretty great emacs fanatic myself, I think that this is one of the few cases where you'd be doing yourself a disservice by using the emacs alternative. Anki is extremely keyboard-friendly (more so than anything bar Emacs and vim), pretty extensible in a decent language (python), and unlike Emacs in this case, has a huge ecosystem behind it. The only thing missing is the possibility of using Emacs keybindings in text input fields (which is Qt's fault) — if that's important for you, you can use Emacs for input into Anki — google for it, as they're seem to be several options... FWIW I read somewhere that Anki started off as an Emacs mode, initially, though the only source I could find now (quickly), is this: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10925971 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10925971 Edit: The Web archive helps (as always): http://web.archive.org/web/20091001153225/http://ichi2.net:80/flashcard/ http://web.archive.org/web/20091001153225/http://ichi2.net:8...
random_kris 8y ago
been researching spaced repetition and anki/sm and other stuff... I decided to try it because my memmory is quite bad when learning new stuff. I am also a daily weed smoker so my short-term memmory is quite bad but since positives outweigh the negative sides I don't plan on stopping. What do you guys think am I in big disadvantage?
wb36 8y ago
Memrise.com (primarily for learning the vocabulary of another language) combines spaced repetition with mnemonics. When learning a particular piece of vocabulary it will offer up an ordered list of suggested mnemonics based on their popularity in other sets. Extremely effective for its use case.
monikagab 8y ago
One of the options you can choose is to edit websites by clicking the Edit button near the website you want to modify in the CRM. http://support.exai.com/manage-my-account/crm-actions/edit-websites http://support.exai.com/manage-my-account/crm-actions/edit-w...
drstrangevibes 8y ago
I'm actually trying to remember less and develop, better searchable notes.
deleted 8y ago
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asdfman123 8y ago
So can anyone summarize the memorization algorithm for me? I don't have time right now to read through the full article. How often should repetitions be spaced, roughly speaking? Is there a rule of thumb?
- savanaly 8y ago
  This is one flavor of these types of algorithms that you can viably implement yourself: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Leitner_system https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Leitner_system
  - asdfman123 8y ago
    That's funny. I developed a crude version of that algorithm by separating my flash cards into easy, medium, and hard stacks. I spent most time on the hard stack and would downgrade the difficulty of cards after I increasingly mastered them. Nothing groundbreaking. I'm sure other people have done the same things out of sheer efficiency - no need to keep going over the easy cards.
- Jtsummers 8y ago
  Rough algorithm: Study 10-20 new facts today. Review them afterward (same day). Once you feel you “know” them push them to tomorrow. Review old facts. If you still know it, approximately double the time until you see it again. If the last review was 1 week ago, next would be in 2 weeks. If you’ve forgotten it either restart it (you really don’t know it) or use some easing factor to schedule it. Real answer: get Anki and let it do the work. Tweak it as needed.
khazhoux 8y ago
Is there a version of this or some alternative for learning+remembering music? I learn a piano piece, memorize and internalize it, but then if I stop playing it for a few weeks, it completely vanishes from my head. Super frustrating, it's like starting over every time. On the other hand, I have very good auditory memory -- I can "hear" and recall music in my head without problems. But that's unhelpful to me when I try to play music.
- mtwshngtn 8y ago
  Play very slowly through the piece at least a couple times every time you practice. So slowly that it's hard to discern what piece is being played. Repeat the same process when you have your piece memorized. Then play your piece from memory but hands alone. You will build up the muscle memory required to keep the piece in your fingers, rather than your head.
  - khazhoux 8y ago
    No, I did that already. I practice slow and methodically. I keep a measure-by-measure logbook of progress. Muscle memory established. I can then play expressively from memory. But eventually I'll move on to the next piece, and wind up forgetting to re-visit the other one for a few weeks or months. Gone!!
    - chillacy 8y ago
      > and wind up forgetting to re-visit the other one for a few weeks or months Maybe adapt your practice to the forgetting curve, revisit a piece the next day, then in 3 days, then in 7 days, then in 2 weeks, then 1 month, then 3 months, etc. If ever you mess up the piece, then it's back to 1 day.
      - khazhoux 8y ago
        This makes sense. Thanks!
hoodwink 8y ago
It took me several attempts to ascend the learning curve of Anki, but once I did, it changed my life. Anki Essentials by Alex Vermeer [0] was the introduction that got me over the hump. Now I use Anki almost daily for learning programming, math, vocabulary, and retaining books I've read. On books, I originally wrote a script that scraped the Kindle highlights page and converted them into a file that could be imported into Anki. I'd Cloze delete passages and review maybe 20 a day. That practice was so beneficial that I've since started developing it into a standalone product called Readwise. [1] Readwise doesn't yet incorporate hardcore spaced repetition and active recall principles, but it will soon. [0] https://alexvermeer.com/anki-essentials/ https://alexvermeer.com/anki-essentials/ [1] https://readwise.io https://readwise.io
- QuixoticQuibit 8y ago
  Readwise seems very useful to me since I already use Instapaper. Since you're here, I was hoping to ask some questions: 1. Have you considered some way to add Instapaper-like parsing and highlighting into your service? It isn't cheap paying for two subscriptions with Instapaper reverting back to a $30/year subscription for my internet highlighting/notes plus your subscription. 2. From the website, it seems like you already have spaced repetition. What are you hoping to add? 3. What spacing repetition algorithm are you using? SM?
- j_chodorowicz 8y ago
  Thats awesome! Have you considered Diigo integration?
brucardoso 8y ago
Piotr Wozniak just posted a new article about SRS https://www.supermemo.com/pl/articles/history https://www.supermemo.com/pl/articles/history (June, 2018)
jammygit 8y ago
I used to use supermemo a lot but when I found out I couldn't export my cards (at the time anyway) I got nervous and switched to Anki Does anybody know if the original creator is still in charge? Supermemo.com got reworked really heavily a couple of years ago and I wondered if he may have sold his company, or maybe just hired a team to make some apps

740 points by colinprince 8y ago

e19293001 8y ago

I just found out that you can use SuperMemo without a computer. https://www.supermemo.com/articles/paper.htm https://www.supermemo.com/articles/paper.htm I thought it would be interesting for me to do this method while I'm studying a scientific paper. Any thoughts?

pavelpokorny 8y ago
I've used the paper method in the beginnings of my English study and it worked well for me. SuperMemo was a really great tool and I liked it very much. Managed to keep using it for maybe 10 years, and I'm still sorry that I've stopped when the program and its community were in decline. But the method and algorithm remain the best and it's great to see it's used in modern applications - not just Anki but perhaps in all major language teaching apps. The fact that this article made it to HN front page speaks for itself. As for using it for scientific paper study - depends what you expect from it. Spaced repetition is great for remembering and retention of facts. When I'm reading a scientifi paper, I rather struggle with the basic understanding of it :)
- andai 8y ago
  Ahh, but if you could better remember everything you have understood, surely that would help with understanding the next paper!
z0k 8y ago
There are some useful tips for reading papers using Anki here: http://augmentingcognition.com/ltm.html http://augmentingcognition.com/ltm.html Scroll down to the heading "Using Anki to thoroughly read a research paper in an unfamiliar field".

subsubsub 8y ago

> "To Remember Everything You Learn, Surrender to This Algorithm" > "The winter sun sets in mid-afternoon in Kolobrzeg, Poland, but the early twilight does not deter people from taking their regular outdoor promenade" I find titles promising a specific piece of useful information combined with longform, author storyline based content to be one of the most fustrating things about reading traditional journalism on the internet. A form of bait and switch.

ai_ia 8y ago
Same here also it did feel like it was an sponsored ad for the company.
richforrester 8y ago
"this one algorithm" -> 6000+ words No proper headings. To hell with that. I won't ever know what they're on about.
deleted 8y ago
[deleted]
ajuc 8y ago
The algorithm (version 2, there are newer versions too). https://www.supermemo.com/english/ol/sm2.htm https://www.supermemo.com/english/ol/sm2.htm
koolba 8y ago
You mean like every search result for “X recipe”?
- nkozyra 8y ago
  I feel like it must be some SEO requirement - because otherwise who wants a rambling tale of the time someone's gammy took them down to the shore to experience the beach life, finding adventures and making new friends and then paragraphs later ok here's the recipe for Maple bourbon glazed salmon you wanted
bufferoverflow 8y ago

btrettel 8y ago

I used Anki (similar to SuperMemo) to study for my PhD qualifiers and it definitely helped. I kept up the cards for a while after that, adding more and more. I'm convinced I would have not passed the measure theoretic probability theory class I took without spaced repetition software. The software also proved very useful when I would have a technical idea and had no reference on me as I could remember the details of many results. It seemed to accelerate my thoughts in a way too by removing the delay to look up some information. Eventually, I did not have the time or need to keep reviewing the cards, so I stopped. But I intend to pick it up again after cleaning up the cards after my PhD. I highly recommend the software. One piece of advice: I treat these flash cards as basically fast tests that trigger a review if you fail. I recommend this approach as many people seem to think flash cards can only be definitions. Some of my cards are definitions, some are short problems, some are proofs, etc. The definitions are unit tests. Problems and proofs are integration tests. Both are necessary.

ginnungagap 8y ago
I can also recommend Anki, I used it to improve my German vocabulary and it was rather helpful! I study maths and I never thought about using flashcards for it, but it's a cool idea, I might try it out!
- philbarr 8y ago
  Are there sets of cards for known problems, such as learning language X, or is making the cards part of the learning process?
  - kd5bjo 8y ago
    Both; success rates are significantly lower if you use somebody else’s cards. Seeing the card you made reminds you of making the card, which helps you remember the information you were trying to capture at the time.
  - joshvm 8y ago
    Languages, yes. There are plenty of pre-made decks for learning the basics of pretty much all the major languages. Beyond that it's a mixed bag. There are usually decks for things like verbs and common nouns. Getting comprehension practice (e.g. grammar) is harder because that only comes with ingesting lots of material from different places (otherwise you tend to 'overfit' and rote learn the flashcards). Making your own cards is more effective than using someone else's deck, simply because it's tailored to you. For anything other than a language, unless it's pop trivia, you should try to make your own cards. You typically have to work methodically through the thing you're trying to learn, which can help a lot. If you go with a pre-made deck then you're relying on what someone else thinks you ought to know.

femto 8y ago

It would make sense if you could get electronic textbooks which are already in the question/answer form required by spaced repetition software, ready to "load and learn". Rather than reading a traditional textbook, you would take an equivalent question/answer set and learn it by spaced repetition. Do such things exist? Following on from that, maybe such question answer sets could be automatically generated from the semantic web? A simple example would be a question/answer set about capital cities, but could one pick an arbitrary subject and manufacture a list of questions about it?

ai_ia 8y ago
> It would make sense if you could get electronic textbooks which are already in the question/answer form required by spaced repetition software, ready to "load and learn". Rather than reading a traditional textbook, you would take an equivalent question/answer set and learn it by spaced repetition. Do such things exist? I am working to solve exactly this. A form of learning where the learning happens due to interaction between a bot and a human. Machine teaching humans basically. Been working for over 20 months. Will be releasing within two weeks. :)
- ipsum2 8y ago
  I'm guessing your username is relevant :). Using AI for intelligence amplification? Excited to hear about your project.
  - ai_ia 8y ago
    Haha. Thanks. The project doesn't use AI at all. I figured out that you don't really require the system to pass turing test in order to develop tutoring system. It can assist in clever ways. That being said, Primer ( the tutoring system ) will teach ML/DL/RL courses. For more info, you can subscribe to the mailing list here, https://tinyletter.com/primerlabs/ https://tinyletter.com/primerlabs/. I will post within two weeks.
- Aduket 8y ago
  keep me updated please, good luck.

1024core 8y ago

> how to become a genius: You must clarify your goals, gain knowledge through spaced repetition, preserve health, work steadily, minimize stress, refuse interruption, and never resist sleep when tired.

Scarblac 8y ago
That sounds quite good actually. Now how to do that consistently...
- comboy 8y ago
  First you must convince yourself that becoming a genius (whatever that means) is more important to you than whatever it is that you are currently doing. Then you just act based on your worldview, as you always do.
cJ0th 8y ago
Maybe it's just me who after years at uni is sick of viewing everything from this impoverished academic point of view but I think these statements are not helpful at all. People worship advice/knowledge these days and totally forget about the doing. The statement does not deny that actually doing stuff is important - "work steadily". However, these are just empty words to someone who tries to become a genius by hitting the books first. My advice (yes, I do see the irony here) in this age would be to postpone seeking advice or reading about a topic as long as possible. As a result, your common sense sharpens and you may even come up with fresh, creative ideas that others perhaps didn't have.
- rimliu 8y ago
  > postpone seeking advice or reading about > a topic as long as possible Oh gosh, the number of inefficient solutions, horrible architectures, brain-dead encryption systems I saw, because of the people who did not bother to open a book. To come up with creative solutions you need to have a base for said creativity. I.e. to connect the dots in original way you need to have the dots already. I have nor proof, but I suspect that the number of useful solutions created by people who know nothing about the field is close to zero. Somehow I doubt one would see much further when instead of climbing onto the shoulders of giants they prefer to stay in the pit of their own ignorance.

xkfm 8y ago

This is by far my favorite piece of software I've ever purchased (and one that's keeping me on Windows). It's very obtuse to use and not really user friendly at all unless you're just making flashcards with it. I get the impression that it's somewhat dogfooding taken to the extreme, and it's almost as if they're selling it as a side project. There are so many random features like the sleep tracker (https://www.supermemo.com/help/sleep.htm https://www.supermemo.com/help/sleep.htm) that don't really make much sense to have but are there anyway. There's also a web version if you just want flashcards that's mainly focused on language learning. They sell some courses and you can add your own cards too. The biggest selling point for me is the incremental reading (https://www.supermemo.com/help/read.htm https://www.supermemo.com/help/read.htm) feature. It's the only way I can manage to keep track of so many articles that I find interesting, and is vastly superior to leaving hundreds of tabs open or a bunch of bookmarks I'll never look at. It's superior to instapaper,readitlater etc because I don't have to decide what to read when I open the app, and I don't have to worry about forgetting about the article if I stop in the middle of it. If I see anything remotely interesting, I just chuck it in Supermemo, and I'll see it eventually. If it's really important, I'll set its priority higher so I see the article sooner. If I'm doing research on something and have 15 tabs open, all 15 tabs go into Supermemo, and will eventually get whittled down into flashcards. Start with an article -> extracts -> smaller extracts -> cloze deleted flashcard. Long comment chains on Hacker News? Supermemo. Youtube videos? Supermemo. Email? Supermemo. Images? Supermemo. I check my RSS feeds once or twice a week, grab all the interesting articles, import into supermemo, and I'm done. Supermemo for me replaces: Evernote/OneNote, most bookmarks, Anki, and various todo list apps. If I just wanted to make flashcards from set material, I'd honestly use Anki, because of the mobile apps. It's really easy to do a few repetitions when you have downtime through the day. Every person I've shown this app too doesn't really care about it, and I don't really know why. If I had to guess, it's probably because the UI is horrific. I can effortlessly keep up with so much information, and it takes an hour or two out of my day.

miranda_rights 8y ago
I've heard fantastic things about SuperMemo but don't have a Windows machine - and don't plan on buying one. It's extremely unfortunate there's no Mac version.

Arun2009 8y ago

> "To this day," Bjork says, "most people think about forgetting as decay, that memories are like footprints in the sand that gradually fade away. But that has been disproved by a lot of research. The memory appears to be gone because you can't recall it, but we can prove that it's still there. For instance, you can still recognize a 'forgotten' item in a group. Yes, without continued use, things become inaccessible. But they are not gone." This was quite eye opening to me when I first heard of it. Apparently, our long term memory is virtually limitless. You never truly lose something you once had learned well. Another fact about memory that I found equally interesting: memory is not a "thing" but a process. When you recall something, you are actually reconstructing the memory from various factors associated with it, pretty much like how a paleontologist might reconstruct the image of a dinosaur from fossil remains.

colordrops 8y ago
It seems to me that there are two gates, and they move with age, and the rate at which they move differs from person to person. The first gate is the time until losing something from associative memory. The second gate is losing the memory completely. Yes, this does happen, and it happens to everyone. But the quote still has some validity in that many things we think we forgot are still buried deep inside.
tzs 8y ago
> This was quite eye opening to me when I first heard of it. Apparently, our long term memory is virtually limitless. You never truly lose something you once had learned well. There are startling experiments in the area. Take a large set of pictures (it has been done with sets of up to 20000 at least). Take half those pictures and show them to subjects, one at a time, giving them a few seconds to look at each picture. Later, take the set of pictures you showed them, and pair each with one of the pictures you did not show them. Shuffle that set of picture pairs, and then show the subject the pairs sequentially, asking them for each which picture of the pair they have seen before. On a test that used 20000 pictures, with the recognition test a day and half later, subjects got 80% right. If instead people had just been asked to recall as many pictures as they could, most people only be able to recall a tiny fraction of them. Here are a couple of papers in this area: https://www.gwern.net/docs/spacedrepetition/1973-standing.pdf https://www.gwern.net/docs/spacedrepetition/1973-standing.pd... https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/18787113 https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/18787113 > Another fact about memory that I found equally interesting: memory is not a "thing" but a process. When you recall something, you are actually reconstructing the memory from various factors associated with it, pretty much like how a paleontologist might reconstruct the image of a dinosaur from fossil remains This is sort of illustrated by a thing called the Baker/baker paradox. Show people a photograph of someone, with a label that says "BAKER" attached. Tell half the subjects that the label means that the person is a baker, and tell the other half that the label means his name is Baker. Later, show the subjects the photo but with the label removed, and ask them what the missing label had said. The people given the job story will be much more successful at remembering this than the people given the name story. The name "Baker" has very little associated with it in most people's minds, whereas the job "baker" brings up associations with all kinds of delicious treats, and maybe childhood memories of wonderful smells permeating the house as your mother baked in the kitchen. So when you are told the photo is of a baker, all of those things that baking is associated with in your mind get associated with the photo, and you've got more to grab onto mentally when trying to recall the label. These may be weak associations, but they still beat out the name "baker" which for most people has no extra associations. Anyway, we don't just reconstruct the memory to recall it. We also might edit it and save the changes. This has serious implications for the criminal justice system when dealing with human witnesses. If an investigator interviewing the witness says anything that suggests events happened different than the way the witness remembers them, there is a danger the witness' memory will change to match the interviewer's version. The witness will not know this is happening, and genuinely believe that the updated memory is what really happened. These aren't always minor updates...they can be big, like in a confrontation changing who drew a gun and started shooting. I don't have a link, but I've read of experiments where researchers got parents or older siblings of some adult subjects to mention at a family gathering some amusing/embarrassing incident from the subject's childhood--a totally made up incident. Later, the researchers found excuses to question the subjects about that incident, and the subjects "remembered" it, and not only the details that had been supplied in the made up story. They had filled in complete details about the incident and the things leading up to it and following it.

known 8y ago

Feynman technique https://qz.com/849256/how-to-master-a-new-subject/ https://qz.com/849256/how-to-master-a-new-subject/

lihaciudaniel 8y ago
I guess Feynman technique needs to be used in a record time. I find it very time consuming, I just do it after learning something but I don't want to spend too much time on it.

AJRF 8y ago

TL;DR: The "algorithm" is spaced repetition. God this was a frustrating article to read. Spaced repetition does work though, I used a tool called Anki which has a free online sync service and free apps for every platform (bar iOS, it costs £15 on that platform).

e19293001 8y ago
From Anki manual[0]: Internally, Anki’s spaced repetition system is based on an older version of the SuperMemo algorithm called SM2 [0] - https://apps.ankiweb.net/docs/manual.html https://apps.ankiweb.net/docs/manual.html
arendtio 8y ago
> God this was a frustrating article to read. Exactly what I thought. Some parts (10%) are very interesting, but it contains so much stuff I don't want to remember...
mcguire 8y ago
It's a profile of the SuperMemo creators, not a how-to.

praptak 8y ago

The TLDR: the algorithm is spaced repetition. Notable apps that implement it are SuperMemo (this one got it popular) and Anki (the free one).

megous 8y ago
Next article will be 6000 words about how moderate exercise improves general well being.

thestephen 8y ago

This type of learning, combined with applying the knowledge learned, is easily one of the biggest lifehacks I've encountered. Growing up, I (falsely) internalized that I somehow had a hard time learning languages. However, with the help of Anki, that has an algorithm based on SuperMemo, I realized that this wasn't the case - just that the traditional textbook methods weren't for me when it comes to cramming in "arbitrary" information. While living in Japan, I used Anki to supplement my recognition of kanji. I averaged roughly 7 minutes of studies for a year, internalizing the meanings and readings of roughly 1000 characters with a 95% retention rate. Judging from my peers, the only ones that managed to pick up this volume were those that studied the language full-time. Of course, they learned the language overall at a much higher level than I did - this methodology purely focused on the recognition aspect. Naturally, I got to put the characters to use living in the country, and I also spent time making up mnemonics for each character. Your mileage may vary.

pbhjpbhj 8y ago
I'm curious what your mnemonics are like, could you give an example or two? I'm not a student of Japanese, but AIUI there are pictographs and ideographs amongst the characters, presumably these are effectively already mnemonics?
- yorwba 8y ago
  That might have been true of the original bone script characters, but over the millennia they have been stylized beyond recognition, and many new characters were created. Modern Japanese or Chinese is about as mnemonic as the typical icon set used in a GUI application. However, most characters are composed of a few common components, called radicals, which can sometimes provide hints about the meaning. For example, the Chinese words 海 "sea", 波浪 "wave" and 渴 "thirsty" all contain the water radical ⺡. Similarly for 丝绸 "silk" and 缠绕 "wind around", which contain the thread radical ⺓. Personally, I don't use any mnemonics, but I know someone who does, and he'd assigned each radical a memorable representation (e.g. the thread corresponds to Spiderman) and then he had a story linking a word to the components, so that 丝绸 would be about two Spidermen, one of which wraps himself in silk to use it as a ghost costume.

zhdc1 8y ago

Obligatory shout out to Learn with Texts - http://lwt.sourceforge.net/ http://lwt.sourceforge.net/ - which interfaces with Anki.

rdfi 8y ago

I've been doing spaced repetition with Anki since 2013. I wrote about my experience here: https://www.blinkingcaret.com/2016/05/04/hack-your-brain-learn-faster-better/ https://www.blinkingcaret.com/2016/05/04/hack-your-brain-lea... If I could only give one advice to someone about improving their learning skills, it would be to learn about spaced repetition

growlist 8y ago

I use Anki. It really does work. A few things I found: 1. It takes discipline to understand the material properly before attempting to just bang it all in Anki, but learning directly from Anki can be miserable, so it really is best to try to grasp it fully before going near Anki 2. Creating the right questions can be difficult - sometimes I found myself able to regurgitate the answer but other tests proved I didn't really understand the meaning. One way to approach this is to test different aspects of the answer, or to add the inverse of the question. Still even if you don't grasp the meaning properly just having a rote answer in your head can improve your capability 3. Life often gets in the way of the discipline required!

roi 8y ago

The best and most practical introduction to spaced repetition is Michael Nielsen's Augmenting Long-term Memory (http://augmentingcognition.com/ltm.html http://augmentingcognition.com/ltm.html), already discussed in https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17460513 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17460513.

Mbioguy 8y ago

Few people have tried Anki (a free alternative to SuperMemo). Even fewer have tried its add-ons, which is where it truly shines! Vanilla Anki is mostly good for text flashcarding, with the phone app helpful for making use of those little bits of downtime throughout the day. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=c-4xOe79epU&list=PL3MozITKTz5YFHDGB19ypxcYfJ1ITk_6o https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=c-4xOe79epU&list=PL3MozITKTz... https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QzBoDe3PgAc&list=PL3MozITKTz5Y9owI163AJMYqKwhFrTKcT https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QzBoDe3PgAc&list=PL3MozITKTz... Glutanimate has taken Anki to a whole new level. He created a painless UI for occluding any part of an image and making Anki flashcards out of it (Image Occlusion Enhanced). I used it to efficiently create and memorize thousands of anatomy flashcards. Ordered lists can be a real pain to memorize, but when not missing steps is crucial (as it is for medical OSCEs), Cloze Overlapper has worked very well. Anki lets you share your decks with others, and medical students have collaboratively created very high quality study decks for studying for the various STEP exams. To be honest, I was always a fairly mediocre student. Big-picture concepts and figuring things out on the fly, no prob. But I've always struggled to nail down bits of information long-term or learn sequential information, meaning calc and ochem required inordinate amounts of time. No longer the case. Spaced repetition plus visual/text/auditory learning is a recipe for success. The possibilities here should not be underestimated. Folks on Hacker News have talked about the value of information commons, and this right here is the next best example behind Wikipedia I have ever encountered. While quality collaborative decks exist for things like medical school, learning languages, and more, none exist specifically for the program I am in (PA school). I am currently creating my own with the goal of it being the core of a quality collaborative deck. I am using Gephi to spatially organize concept maps for diagnoses complete with incidence and strength of associations, when such information is available. I then export these maps to Anki, use Visual Occlusion Enhanced to block out the information I want to recall, and voila: time-efficient first-time learning and long-term retention.

gbacon 8y ago
I built an Anki deck to study for the FAA instrument written test and the oral exam portion of the instrument practical test. Tips and best practices: * Effective learning: Twenty rules of formulating knowledge[0] * A list of Anki tips and suggestions that [a medical student] wrote[1] * Anki Guide for Medical Students[2] * How to make high quality Anki cards quickly[3] * Anki Tips: What I Learned Making 10,000 Flashcards[4] [0]: https://www.supermemo.com/en/articles/20rules https://www.supermemo.com/en/articles/20rules [1]: https://www.reddit.com/r/medicalschool/comments/4ocdyb/a_list_of_anki_tips_and_suggestions_that_i_wrote/?st=iwlfns6h&sh=945cacd4 https://www.reddit.com/r/medicalschool/comments/4ocdyb/a_lis... [2]: https://drwillbe.blogspot.com/2011/08/anki-guide-for-medical-students.html https://drwillbe.blogspot.com/2011/08/anki-guide-for-medical... [3]: https://managingmedicine.org/2013/05/14/how-to-make-high-quality-anki-cards-quickly/ https://managingmedicine.org/2013/05/14/how-to-make-high-qua... [4]: http://rs.io/anki-tips/ http://rs.io/anki-tips/

Terretta 8y ago

For language learning, consider Pimsleur, who discovered ‘the algo’ previously: “Graduated Interval Recall - Dr. Pimsleur’s research on memory was perhaps one of his most revolutionary achievements. He discovered that if learners were reminded of new words at gradually increasing intervals, each time they would remember longer than the time before. He documented the optimal spacing for information to move from short-term into long-term, or permanent, memory. This theory is at the base of all the Pimsleur programs.” https://www.pimsleur.com/the-pimsleur-method https://www.pimsleur.com/the-pimsleur-method

idoescompooters 8y ago
I'm a big fan of the Living Language package.

Waterluvian 8y ago

I heard a doctor online once say, "watch one, do one, teach one." He was talking about medical procedures but I've focused on the "teach one" part to much success in software.

deleted 8y ago

[deleted]

neuralk 8y ago

Spaced repetition software? A requisite post is gwern's excellent and comprehensive article on them https://www.gwern.net/Spaced-repetition https://www.gwern.net/Spaced-repetition

jjcc 8y ago

It's quite interesting that Anki(It's a Japanese 暗记 for those who don't know where the name comes from) is mentioned a few times but no body mention "Memory palace"[1] and "Major system"[2] yet. Both methods try to hack some features/bugs of our brains built by mother nature during million years of her evolutionary development. Most memory athletes use some variation of these methods to achieve astonishing performance. There's a Dr. Yep can remember a 65 thousands of English word and the locations (i.e. page number and the sequence on that page) of each word on a Chinese/English dictionary. The trick is investing some time to build a personalized memory system, then use the system to remember other things like passport number, credit card , phones etc. It might not be attractive to most people because today we have smart phone to help us. But for learning new knowledge, combination of both space repetition and memory system is quite interesting. Here's what I did: I use a Anki alternative called Memrise[3] to build a Major system. (I also have Anki installed but just prefer Memrise). Then I use Major system to review the concepts I've learned. Major system here is the equivalent of Anki as a tool for short term place holder of space repetition, not directly used for learning. I found brain Anki is better than smartphone Anki/Memrise although I built former Anki with later Anki. Come on fellow hackers, hacking your brain is very rewarding [1]https://artofmemory.com/wiki/Method_of_Loci https://artofmemory.com/wiki/Method_of_Loci [2]https://artofmemory.com/wiki/Major_System https://artofmemory.com/wiki/Major_System [3]https://www.memrise.com/en/ https://www.memrise.com/en/

0xdeadbeefbabe 8y ago
https://artofmemory.com/wiki/Person-Action-Object_(PAO)_System https://artofmemory.com/wiki/Person-Action-Object_(PAO)_Syst... I considered working on this, but I'm just not excited enough about remembering. Thanks google. Oh and Einstein said (according to Shaq) you should never remember what you can go lookup.
- michaelcampbell 8y ago
  The beauty of the human memory system is not whether or not you can remember a thing, but the correlations and relationships between them. A convenient lookup mechanism doesn't help there.

eadmund 8y ago

As soon as I read this, I wondered if someone had written some elisp to do it. Sure enough, org-drill[0] exists and implements spaced-repetition learning. In true emacs fashion, it actually implements three different algorithms which one can choose from! Just looking at it briefly, it appears to be pretty nice. 0: https://orgmode.org/worg/org-contrib/org-drill.html https://orgmode.org/worg/org-contrib/org-drill.html

gnomewascool 8y ago
While I'm a pretty great emacs fanatic myself, I think that this is one of the few cases where you'd be doing yourself a disservice by using the emacs alternative. Anki is extremely keyboard-friendly (more so than anything bar Emacs and vim), pretty extensible in a decent language (python), and unlike Emacs in this case, has a huge ecosystem behind it. The only thing missing is the possibility of using Emacs keybindings in text input fields (which is Qt's fault) — if that's important for you, you can use Emacs for input into Anki — google for it, as they're seem to be several options... FWIW I read somewhere that Anki started off as an Emacs mode, initially, though the only source I could find now (quickly), is this: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10925971 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10925971 Edit: The Web archive helps (as always): http://web.archive.org/web/20091001153225/http://ichi2.net:80/flashcard/ http://web.archive.org/web/20091001153225/http://ichi2.net:8...

random_kris 8y ago

been researching spaced repetition and anki/sm and other stuff... I decided to try it because my memmory is quite bad when learning new stuff. I am also a daily weed smoker so my short-term memmory is quite bad but since positives outweigh the negative sides I don't plan on stopping. What do you guys think am I in big disadvantage?

wb36 8y ago

Memrise.com (primarily for learning the vocabulary of another language) combines spaced repetition with mnemonics. When learning a particular piece of vocabulary it will offer up an ordered list of suggested mnemonics based on their popularity in other sets. Extremely effective for its use case.

monikagab 8y ago

One of the options you can choose is to edit websites by clicking the Edit button near the website you want to modify in the CRM. http://support.exai.com/manage-my-account/crm-actions/edit-websites http://support.exai.com/manage-my-account/crm-actions/edit-w...

drstrangevibes 8y ago

I'm actually trying to remember less and develop, better searchable notes.

deleted 8y ago

[deleted]

asdfman123 8y ago

So can anyone summarize the memorization algorithm for me? I don't have time right now to read through the full article. How often should repetitions be spaced, roughly speaking? Is there a rule of thumb?

savanaly 8y ago
This is one flavor of these types of algorithms that you can viably implement yourself: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Leitner_system https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Leitner_system
- asdfman123 8y ago
  That's funny. I developed a crude version of that algorithm by separating my flash cards into easy, medium, and hard stacks. I spent most time on the hard stack and would downgrade the difficulty of cards after I increasingly mastered them. Nothing groundbreaking. I'm sure other people have done the same things out of sheer efficiency - no need to keep going over the easy cards.
Jtsummers 8y ago
Rough algorithm: Study 10-20 new facts today. Review them afterward (same day). Once you feel you “know” them push them to tomorrow. Review old facts. If you still know it, approximately double the time until you see it again. If the last review was 1 week ago, next would be in 2 weeks. If you’ve forgotten it either restart it (you really don’t know it) or use some easing factor to schedule it. Real answer: get Anki and let it do the work. Tweak it as needed.

khazhoux 8y ago

Is there a version of this or some alternative for learning+remembering music? I learn a piano piece, memorize and internalize it, but then if I stop playing it for a few weeks, it completely vanishes from my head. Super frustrating, it's like starting over every time. On the other hand, I have very good auditory memory -- I can "hear" and recall music in my head without problems. But that's unhelpful to me when I try to play music.

mtwshngtn 8y ago
Play very slowly through the piece at least a couple times every time you practice. So slowly that it's hard to discern what piece is being played. Repeat the same process when you have your piece memorized. Then play your piece from memory but hands alone. You will build up the muscle memory required to keep the piece in your fingers, rather than your head.
- khazhoux 8y ago
  No, I did that already. I practice slow and methodically. I keep a measure-by-measure logbook of progress. Muscle memory established. I can then play expressively from memory. But eventually I'll move on to the next piece, and wind up forgetting to re-visit the other one for a few weeks or months. Gone!!
  - chillacy 8y ago
    > and wind up forgetting to re-visit the other one for a few weeks or months Maybe adapt your practice to the forgetting curve, revisit a piece the next day, then in 3 days, then in 7 days, then in 2 weeks, then 1 month, then 3 months, etc. If ever you mess up the piece, then it's back to 1 day.
    - khazhoux 8y ago
      This makes sense. Thanks!

hoodwink 8y ago

It took me several attempts to ascend the learning curve of Anki, but once I did, it changed my life. Anki Essentials by Alex Vermeer [0] was the introduction that got me over the hump. Now I use Anki almost daily for learning programming, math, vocabulary, and retaining books I've read. On books, I originally wrote a script that scraped the Kindle highlights page and converted them into a file that could be imported into Anki. I'd Cloze delete passages and review maybe 20 a day. That practice was so beneficial that I've since started developing it into a standalone product called Readwise. [1] Readwise doesn't yet incorporate hardcore spaced repetition and active recall principles, but it will soon. [0] https://alexvermeer.com/anki-essentials/ https://alexvermeer.com/anki-essentials/ [1] https://readwise.io https://readwise.io

QuixoticQuibit 8y ago
Readwise seems very useful to me since I already use Instapaper. Since you're here, I was hoping to ask some questions: 1. Have you considered some way to add Instapaper-like parsing and highlighting into your service? It isn't cheap paying for two subscriptions with Instapaper reverting back to a $30/year subscription for my internet highlighting/notes plus your subscription. 2. From the website, it seems like you already have spaced repetition. What are you hoping to add? 3. What spacing repetition algorithm are you using? SM?
j_chodorowicz 8y ago
Thats awesome! Have you considered Diigo integration?

brucardoso 8y ago

Piotr Wozniak just posted a new article about SRS https://www.supermemo.com/pl/articles/history https://www.supermemo.com/pl/articles/history (June, 2018)

jammygit 8y ago

I used to use supermemo a lot but when I found out I couldn't export my cards (at the time anyway) I got nervous and switched to Anki Does anybody know if the original creator is still in charge? Supermemo.com got reworked really heavily a couple of years ago and I wondered if he may have sold his company, or maybe just hired a team to make some apps