But what’s less widely known is that a quiet revolution has greatly improved spaced repetition systems over the last couple of years, making them significantly more efficient and less frustrating to use. The magic ingredient is a new scheduling algorithm known as FSRS, by Jarrett Ye.
I was skeptical, but I tried getting into spaced repetition again and I can say that the FSRS algorithm feels just magical. I often find that I’m just barely able to recall the other side of the card, which is exactly the goal of spaced repetition software. And in general, it doesn’t feel like it wastes my time nearly as much as older scheduling algorithms did.
So, I was wondering whether this is usable in anki, and indeed, there appears to be a simple setting for it without even having to install a plugin, as described here in 4 easy steps. I’ll see if it makes a notable difference.
Not so relatedly, this made me realize a connection I hadn’t really thought about before: I wish music apps like Spotify would use something vaguely like spaced repetition for Shuffle mode. In the sense of finding some good algorithm to predict, based on past listening behavior, which song in a playlist the user is most likely to currently enjoy, and weighing their occurrences in shuffle mode accordingly. One could, very roughly, treat skipping a song as getting a flashcard right—it will then have some exponential backoff before it returns. But not skipping the song would be roughly like getting a card wrong, and it will show up again very soon. Of course, the algorithm shouldn’t quite be the same, e.g. listening to a song once without skipping shouldn’t have such a drastic effect (as typically the user may not be paying much attention to the music, so not skipping is a rather weak signal). But, yeah… I kind of doubt these platforms are working on anything like this, as they most likely don’t care much about such intangible value propositions that are hard to measure in A/B tests.
There was a recent post titled “Spaced Repetition Systems Have Gotten Way Better”: https://domenic.me/fsrs/
It mentions this:
I was skeptical, but I tried getting into spaced repetition again and I can say that the FSRS algorithm feels just magical. I often find that I’m just barely able to recall the other side of the card, which is exactly the goal of spaced repetition software. And in general, it doesn’t feel like it wastes my time nearly as much as older scheduling algorithms did.
So, I was wondering whether this is usable in anki, and indeed, there appears to be a simple setting for it without even having to install a plugin, as described here in 4 easy steps. I’ll see if it makes a notable difference.
Not so relatedly, this made me realize a connection I hadn’t really thought about before: I wish music apps like Spotify would use something vaguely like spaced repetition for Shuffle mode. In the sense of finding some good algorithm to predict, based on past listening behavior, which song in a playlist the user is most likely to currently enjoy, and weighing their occurrences in shuffle mode accordingly. One could, very roughly, treat skipping a song as getting a flashcard right—it will then have some exponential backoff before it returns. But not skipping the song would be roughly like getting a card wrong, and it will show up again very soon. Of course, the algorithm shouldn’t quite be the same, e.g. listening to a song once without skipping shouldn’t have such a drastic effect (as typically the user may not be paying much attention to the music, so not skipping is a rather weak signal). But, yeah… I kind of doubt these platforms are working on anything like this, as they most likely don’t care much about such intangible value propositions that are hard to measure in A/B tests.