This is Tech

Last week Wired magazine published an in-depth article profiling the creator of a learning software application called SuperMemo. The concept for this software is that memorization and learning is achieved through repetition, but that the ideal time to refresh your memory about something is as close as possible to when you about to forget it. Apparently, research has shown that reviewing material at the right time significantly increases retention. This is referred to as the Spacing Effect.

After reading the article, I checked out the SuperMemo software, which runs on a variety of platforms, but not OSX. The windows version of the program is not user friendly. The algorithm it implements may be efficient, but it wasn’t a program I would want to use on account of its cumbersome interface, and need for Windows.

With some further research, I identified a Mac OSX program called Genius, which is a free flash card program for the Mac. This program is much more user friendly, but didn’t seem to implement the timing based algorithm that makes SuperMemo unique.

This evening, I read about an open source program called the Mnemosyne Project, which I am hoping will combine the simplicity of Genius with the effectiveness of SuperMemo. More information on Mnemosyne below:

The Mnemosyne software resembles a traditional flash-card program to help you memorise question/answer pairs, but with an important twist: it uses a sophisticated algorithm to schedule the best time for a card to come up for review. Difficult cards that you tend to forget quickly will be scheduled more often, while Mnemosyne won’t waste your time on things you remember well.

The software runs on Linux, Windows and Mac OS X.

While you use the software, detailed statistics can be kept on your learning process. If you want, these logs can be uploaded in a transparent and anonymous way to a central server for analysis.

This data will be valuable to study the behaviour of our memory over a very long time period. As an additional benefit, the results will be used to improve the scheduling algorithms behind the software even further.

If you have any software learning tools that you like, or have experience with any of the applications described above, leave a comment below.