ran3000
Joined 9 years ago
Joined 9 years ago
How far along are you in developing the system?
My personal interest is more on conceptual knowledge, like math, cs, history or random blog posts and ideas. It's often the case that, on the same article, different people focus different things, so it would be hard to collect even a small number of reviews on a flashcard you want to study.
There's a lot of UX work to do for SRS. Do you have a sense of how well the ideas behind Humane SRS translate outside of language learning? I imagine the main challenge would be identifying a steady influx of new cards.
I agree that gains in scheduling accuracy are fairly imperceptible for most students. That's why, over the past few years building https://rember.com, we've focused on UX rather than memory models. People who review hundreds of card a day definitely feel the difference, doing 50 fewer reviews per day is liberating. And now that LLMs can generate decent-quality flashcards, people will build larger and larger collections, so scheduler improvements might suddenly become much more important.
Ultimately, though, the biggest advantages is freeing the SRS designer. I'm sure you've grappled with questions like "is the right unit the card, the note, the deck or something else entirely?" or "what happens to the review history if the student edits a card?". You have to consider how review UX, creation/editing flows, and card organization interact. Decoupling the scheduler from these concerns would help a ton.
Using decks to draw semantic boundaries is likely overly constraining. I think we want to account for finer differences between cards. Decks are coarse and people differ in the ways they use them, some people recommend having just one global deck. Notes are too fine. We explored something in between: a note capturing an idea or concept, plus an associated set of cards. Turns out it's hard to draw idea boundaries. That's why I think it's easier to relate cards by semantic embeddings or more rigid but clearer structures, like the DAG of dependencies suggested elsewhere in this thread.
Since in Anki the "note" is the editing unit, that works for some cloze deletions but not for QA cards (only for double-sided QA cards). A content-aware memory model would allow you to apply "disperse siblings" to any set of cards, independently of whether they were created together in the same editing interface.
I think you can do both and get even better results. The main limitation is that the same flashcards must be studied by multiple students, which doesn't generally apply.
I also love the idea of the market, you could even extend it to evaluate/write high-quality flashcards.