On 19 May 2010 07:06, Wim Woittiez <[email protected]> wrote: > In any case, I don't like the idea of an algorithm guessing my mood. > In my opinion, man-machine interaction should always be based on > clarity: the machine should have a button of which the man knows > exactly what it does. If one such action needs a second action in the > majority of cases, the second action should automatically happen by > default, rather than requiring a second button press, but it shouldn't > have some algorithm to guess whether or not it should happen. That > would make it unpredictable for the man, and therefore consume more > human attention than necessary. (I do realise that reality can be a > bit more complex than this at times, but this illustrates the > principle.)
I think Mnemosyne itself is an obvious counterexample to this. It uses an algorithm to guess when the optimal time (for getting things into long-term memory) to schedule cards is. Similarly, Joel's suggestion involves an algorithm which guesses when the optimal time (for getting cards reviewed) to remind you that you could do some more flashcards. If you don't have a problem with Mnemosyne scheduling cards for you, why would you have a problem with a little reminder program trying to figure out when it's a good time to remind you? IMO it's a really nice idea for a plugin. But what sources of information can be harvested to make decisions (on when it's a good time to do some cards)? For most people, the signs would probably be in their patterns of browser usage (e.g. if I'm flipping through random articles linked from codeproject/ycombinator/reddit/etc, I'm probably pretty idle). > Just my 2 cents' worth... Oh, and another idea! Why don't you add just > 2 or 3 new cards every day? That way, you're learning new stuff, so > your brain will be motivated again to launch it every morning. I find > the progress itself to be extremely rewarding. I can never wait to > have "unlearned cards" counter to 0, so I can add some new ones, then > when I do, I can't wait to have the counter to 0 again etc. Yep, it's pretty important to adjust the number of cards added to match how much time you tend to spend reviewing. I was adding 12 a day for a while and when the daily reviews started going over 180 cards, I started to fall behind, skip days etc and ended up with a big backlog which I'm only now about to clear (having added NO new cards for almost a month). It'd be nice to have an approximate function which estimates how many new cards added will result in equilibrium (having no backlog of due cards) with a fixed number of reviews performed daily, relative to the number of known cards in the deck. Oisín -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "mnemosyne-proj-users" group. To post to this group, send email to [email protected]. To unsubscribe from this group, send email to [email protected]. For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/mnemosyne-proj-users?hl=en.
