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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 AdamThere'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