trane-math VS fsrs4anki

I've been working on https://github.com/trane-project/trane for the past year or so, mostly to get around these limitations. I tried to find a way to use Anki or another existing software to aid my music practice, but I couldn't get it to work.

Some ways in which it's different:

- Dependencies are core to the system. For example, if I am learning a music piece, I want to start by learning small sections and only move on to larger sections when I am good enough the small stuff, eventually ending with a final exercise that tests my performance of the whole piece. A lot of knowledge/skills follow that pattern, but I couldn't find a way to make Anki or SuperMemo understand this.

- It's meant for both memorizing stuff and practicing exercises. I have tested it with your exact example (math problems from textbooks). It works fairly well, but it's at a very early stage (you can look around at https://github.com/trane-project/trane-math, but it still needs a readme). So it's doing the same thing as the students you mentioned. The difference is that the scheduling is done automatically. Review of existing problems and addition of new ones happen without requiring planning or tracking from the student.

- There's an emphasis on generating the flashcards as text files, so they can be shared. I don't understand why people insist of remaking their own flascards every time. If someone wishes to learn guitar, for example, it's my hope they just download some courses and start learning without spending any time redoing flashcards. This design choice probably makes it harder to write the flascards, but it balances out once the flashcards are done and can be passed around.

I started working on this a few weeks ago: https://github.com/trane-project/trane-math It currently needs a README, but you could take a look at the courses on how I am building the flashcards. It's easy to reference external resources, so that's what I have been doing, rather than trying to create exercises of my own.

I am starting with a very basic olympiad-style book and a book based on Euclid's Elements, because I don't have the understanding required to clearly work out the dependencies of more advanced stuff. And I also would like to start at the beginning to make sure I don't miss anything.

The ideal end state is to have courses that cover all the undergrad and grad math curriculum. I am also curious on whether this could be even used by researchers to keep up to date with the latest research on their fields. But all of that is a long way out.

As for your question, there are a couple of ways that Trane could handle multiple paths through similar material.

1. Just have separate curriculums. You could copy the courses, but the second copy has different dependencies, courses/lessons IDs. For example, one could have a series of courses teaching the undergrad MIT math curriculum and another the Harvard curriculum. They might share a lot of the material, but the order will be different.

2. Trane does not lock you into a specific order. There are filters that let you specify which parts of the graph you want to study. You are free to get questions from specific courses and lessons. You can also use the metadata in the courses to say things like "give me questions from all lessons teaching linear algebra" or "give me questions from all courses on real analysis but not from the lessons on set theory". The dependencies between the lessons that match that metadata are still respected. There are a few more options, but you get my point. The dependencies are not set in stone, and there's freedom to jump around and study specific topics.

I actually use option 2 most days. If I want to practice guitar, I just set a filter to give me exercises from the guitar. Similar thing when I want to practice saxophone.

For note-taking specifically, I've tried everything from plain old pen and paper to more modern solutions like Evernote and emacs (if you can call that modern), but nothing I've come across really beats Anki.

Although its main selling point is as a program for flashcards with spaced repetition, it comes with pretty much all the features of a good note-taking app, like tags, easy to organize, synchronization across devices (you can set up your own server), good interface for searching through your notes (which are stored in an Sqlite db if that matters), and yes, LaTeX. Not only that, it's also highly extendable with third-party plugins, so if there are features that you miss chances are there's a plugin for it. In other words, you can use it perfectly fine just taking notes. However, where it really shines is in all of this in combination the spaced repetition algorithm, which is now on steroids with FSRS[1][2]. The downside is that for this to be effective for the things you want to memorize, you'll have to write your notes to be suitable for a flashcard, but if you do it consistently you'll soon notice that you can store most of your notes in your head (needless to say, any student would greatly benefit from this). Now, if that's too much work, you can still just use the scheduling to have it remind you of your notes. Either way, even as someone who sometimes goes out of his way to shoehorn everything into Emacs, I can't see a reason not to use anki for note-taking.

[1]https://github.com/open-spaced-repetition/fsrs4anki/blob/mai...

[2]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OqRLqVRyIzc

I recommend the new algorithm of Anki: https://github.com/open-spaced-repetition/fsrs4anki

It would be nice if you could report this on Github. You can do it here: https://github.com/open-spaced-repetition/fsrs4anki/issues/n...

As for randomly getting a lot of reviews, honestly, no idea. You should submit an issue on github: https://github.com/open-spaced-repetition/fsrs4anki/issues/new/choose

u/PoppingWebster, here's a guide on how to use built-in FSRS in the latest version of Anki: https://github.com/open-spaced-repetition/fsrs4anki/blob/main/docs/tutorial.md

You can watch AnKing's video and read this guide.

Detailed info here: https://github.com/open-spaced-repetition/fsrs4anki/wiki/The-mechanism-of-optimization

use FSRS tho

More information on the new scheduling algorithm:

FWIW I've been using it for the last 10 days and it's finally resolved some of my pain points about having to trial-and-error adjust the old scheduling algorithm, since the content of each deck can greatly affect what the optimal retention is. Now you can just retrain the weights for each deck you have and it will adapt appropriately. The paper is also definitely worth reading if you want to see some rigorous analysis of large-scale real-world spaced repetition science.

[0] https://github.com/open-spaced-repetition/fsrs4anki

[1] https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3534678.3539081?cid=996605471...

[1] https://github.com/open-spaced-repetition/fsrs4anki/wiki/The...