One example of a web of interrelated facts that I have concerns molecular simulations, with bold/italic denoting things that I have in my anki deck, or would make good cards.
One interesting thing about moleculaes bouncing around is that a nanosecond, which sounds really short, is actually a decently long time. Consider that molecules at room temperature are typically moving at about the speed of sound (340 m/s) and a typical chemical bond length is about 0.1 to 0.2 nanometers. This means that a typical molecule (if nothing bumps into it) will go 1700-3400 bond-lengths in a nanosecond! Of course, molecules in liquid, which are jammed pretty close together, won’t move that far without interruptions- they’ll bump into each other, switch direction and bump into others many times over the course of a nanosecond. This means that the typical timestep (the when integrating the differential equations of motion) for a molecular dynamics simulation has to be much shorter. In practice, for a molecular dynamics simulation that simulates all the atoms of a system, is about a femtosecond. With these timesteps, it becomes possible to simulate about a microsecond of simulation time per day of all atoms of a medium-sized protein moving around on a modern GPU like an A40. This is a big reason for why we can’t just simulate a protein folding to crack the protein folding problem. Protein folding takes about a second or on the order of a million GPU-days if you were to simulate it.
Great post!
I think I’d argue something similar but distinct at the beginning. My impression is that people only quit anki for one reason, and that reason is that they don’t like it. All “how to stick with anki” advice is only useful insofar as it makes anki more fun or enjoyable. I genuinely look forward to my reviews (almost) every day. Sometimes I do a lot, sometimes I do a little.
The 20-card/day limit is probably more useful at the beginning, when it can be tempting to try to add in tons of new cards. But more reviews can be fun too! I don’t have a hard limit, and I think I do something like 40-50 reviews/day (and often at the end I still want more!) There’s definitely such a thing as too many reviews, but that threshold is different for everyone. I’d recommend everyone reading this to test their limits, but as soon as you get annoyed, move back into easy-mode.
Also, I’d like to second @Random Developer that knowing to DELETE cards with little provocation is essential to making anki fun. If your cards are annoying, you will start to associate that annoyance with anki more generally. If you are annoyed with anki, you’re more likely to drop it.
From my own experience, the closest I came to deleting anki was when I was trying to learn a bunch of esperanto quickly, doing hundreds of reviews/day (and getting many of them wrong) and became annoyed with it. I tried to push through, but I started to not want to do my other reviews, either. One of the best decisions I ever made was giving up and deleting that entire deck. I think I would have slowly faded away from anki in general if I had stuck with it for a few more weeks. “You must not dread anki; you must not treat it like a chore. If a card causes you to avoid reviewing, gouge it out and throw it away. It is better to give up on one card than to lose the benefits of spaced repetition forever.”