Date: Mon, 09 May 2005 11:13:28 -0400
From: Bruce Webber <bruce@brucewebber.com>
To: lojban-beginners@chain.digitalkingdom.org
Subject: [lojban-beginners] Re: [ANN] LearnLojban for the PalmPilot
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--On Wednesday, May 04, 2005 11:11 PM +1200 Michael van der Gulik 
<mikevdg@gulik.co.nz> wrote:
[snip]
>> Adam Ehlers Nyholm Thomsen wrote:
>> That sounds great I just want to direct your attention towards
>> Rememorizer which is also an open source, supermemo alike memorizer
>> written with superwaba. Rememorizer has its home on
>> http://www.sf.net/projects/rememorizer I don't want to say that you
>> shouldn't do this I just want to say that perhaps it would be more
>> effective for you if you just helped the development of Rememorizer
>> and this way helped a common effort towards creating a more effective
>> open source program, rather than you having to write everything from
>> scratch. This is only a suggestion.
>>
>> Cheers
>> Adam
>
> There's also JDictP, which I've made a Lojban dictionary for but wasn't
> impressed at all with the results.
>
> This application is only 360 lines of code. Flashcard programs are really
> trivial to write, so its hardly worth having many people working on the
> same thing. Also, I tend to like the flexibility of writing things from
> scratch.
>
> But thanks for the tip.
>
> Mikevdg.

One of the non-trivial things to include is spaced repetitions. In order to 
maintain a memory, the intervals between the presentation of the material 
can increase. For example, if I learn a word today, I may need to repeat it 
tomorrow, then three days later, then a week after that, then three weeks 
after that, etc. (I'm making up these intervals to convey the idea; I don't 
know if these are good intervals to use.) If I get it wrong, however, the 
interval between repetitions needs to start again at one day.

The spacing of repetitions allows me to keep adding new information in the 
amount of time I have allotted for learning/review.

The author of Supermemo has taken the algorithm for spaced repetitions to 
an extreme in an attempt to optimize learning. Given all the other factors 
that affect memory, which cannot be controlled or accounted for, the 
learning algorithm probably doesn't have to be that complex. It should, 
however, include some form of spaced repetition, and hence an extension to 
the flashcard database and a few more lines of code :) .

-- 
Bruce Webber
bruce@brucewebber.com
http://www.mountainvision.net