Pretty sure most people review things when it falls even below 50%. I think it’s safe to say here, FSRS achieves at least 43% cost reduction compared with traditional reviewing. That also looks like a very nice number.
Yeah, that sounds good. “With Anki, you can remember more while studying two times less!”
…nevermind, that still sounds like a bad shampoo commercial. But maybe I’m just too nitpicky
EDIT: “With Anki, you can remember more than with traditional studying methods while spending 40% less time studying!” is decent, though a bit too lengthy. Btw, we should keep this in mind: Humans Actually Have an Irrational Preference For Round Numbers : ScienceAlert
We should also somehow make it clear that with Anki you can remember things forever. Well, assuming you do your reviews diligently, but still.
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Hey @dae I think your directions are needed for this. This would allow @landingpageguage to decide on which graphics/numbers to put on display here or whether or not to put something like that at all, potentially expediting the final results. I understand you have your own priority queue and I’m just letting you know something might hold the progress here in absence of your attention.
I think we should focus on the minimal viable page for now. It doesn’t need to be perfect from the start, as we can always make incremental changes to it.
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Maybe this will give you some food for thought
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A new landing page is already being worked upon by him. Read the conversation here. FYI Dae is the lead developer of Anki.
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Though I don’t know if this will help you, this is how I promote Anki on SNS.
- Spaced Repetition algorithm used by Anki (SM2) is about 20 times more efficient than traditional learning. (Michael A. Nielsen)
- The SM2 algorithm is based on SuperMemo’s research.
- SuperMemo is a pioneer of Spaced Repetition research and their latest algorithm (SM19) is the best in the world.
- The FSRS algorithm (free) available in Anki is comparable to SuperMemo’s latest algorithm.
Other important points are these.
- Medical students and language learners have used Anki for many years.
- If students cannot afford to purchase AnkiMobile (iOS), they typically create cards on their laptop and review them on the free AnkiWeb.
- There are active communities that support how to use Anki.
- Anki has been downloaded more than 10 million and there are at least about 3 million active users.(AnkiDorid)
- You can use 1000+ add-ons developed by volunteers to improve learning efficiency, almost all for free.(now 1438 add-ons)
[ Famous people using Anki ]
- Roger Craig : obtained the then-all-time record for single-day winnings on the quiz show Jeopardy! after using Anki to memorize a vast number of facts.
- Greg Yang : mathematician at X.Ai, Elon Musk’s new ai company. He recommended Anki on Twitter(X).
- Washington University School of Medicine : 31% of students who responded to a medical education survey reported using Anki as a study resource, 2015
And I find Anki’s fan art interesting. This illustration has 1.6k upvotes on the Anki subreddit and is the 4th most popular at the moment.
The author is still active on Reddit these days, so if you contact them you might get permission to use it.
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“Medical students and language learners have been using Anki for a long time” is a good way of selling Anki to people not belonging to those two groups. Creates FOMO + perception of Anki being a well-established method among high performers. Other suggestions are good too but I like this one in particular.
One more thing before I finish, why don’t we talk about OSR just like SM? FYI, FSRS is technically created by OSR and this adds some level of authenticity to it. Just something to keep in mind for the future.
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I think OSR (Open Spaced Repetition) is too advanced, novice users do not know what Spaced Repetition is in the first place. For example, I think it would be enough to explain the concept of Spaced Repetition using the Leitner system box. Like this.
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Leitner system is certainly useful. But when I talked of OSR I was thinking of what you said here,
SuperMemo is a pioneer of Spaced Repetition research and their latest algorithm (SM19) is the best in the world.
Seems unfair to mention SuperMemo but not Open Spaced Repetition. OSR’s algorithm also beats SM.
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Previously I promoted FSRS as one of the best algorithms in the world, but there was an discussion that it was inaccurate because algorithms cannot be accurately compared, so I think I have corrected it.
In short, L.M. Sherlock and ClarityInMadness have not claimed that FSRS is superior to SupeMemo (maybe), so I have not either. But I don’t know the latest information.
The reason I am describing SuperMemo is that it is intended to explain Spaced Repetition. Many of the terms used by Anki and FSRS are based on SuperMemo, plus SuperMemo is the only one that provides a wealth of information about the theory and history of Spaced Repetition, and it is also relevant to why SuperMemo’s 20 rules are so important, so it is unavoidable.
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Basically, we just don’t have enough data from SuperMemo users, and we likely never will. LMSherlock asked SuperMemo users to submit their data, but didn’t get enough, and Woz and the other guy (the CEO) won’t be releasing a public API that would allow anyone to run the latest SuperMemo algorithm, so that’s not an option either. So if we can’t get more data from SuperMemo users and can’t run the latest SuperMemo algorithm ourselves, the whole “FSRS vs SuperMemo” thing will forever remain a stalemate.
Btw, you and everyone else, feel free to read this post of mine if you want some more info about benchmarking different spaced repetition algorithms.
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My guess I think LMSherlock is a fan of Dr. Piotr Wozniak. Perhaps he contributes to the development of SuperMemo translations and tools on Github, so he is helping to promote SM18.
This post is very important, however it is difficult to explain for average users.
A newbie knows nothing about using Anki and Spaced Repetition, so explanations about retention rates, difficulty, etc. do not work (They are going to start studying, so they are not learning geeks).
“based on 19,993 collections and 728,883,020 reviews” should be intuitive, so I use it to advertise.
He’s probably a fan, but as far as I know they don’t keep in touch with each other (aside from LMSherlock asking about some technical stuff once), and any kind of cooperation between them is out of the question. This is a speculation, but I’m pretty sure that plans to offer an API were cancelled because Krzysztof (CEO of SuperMemo) and/or Woz was afraid that FSRS is better, and wanted to prevent a fair comparison from happening.
EDIT: just to clarify, I mean that there is a conflict of interests, since if Anki or some other app is demonstrably better than SuperMemo, people won’t buy SuperMemo.
I know. Unfortunately, I don’t know how to “sell” Anki and FSRS to people who learned what spaced repetition means 5 minutes ago.
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That’s why I recommend SuperMemo.
Now let’s get SM19 because it is the best Spaced Repetition algorithm in the world, oh my god it costs $70 and you can’t afford it!
Don’t worry, you can use the 2nd World’s Best Spaced Repetition algorithm FSRS for $0 on Anki.
AnkiMobile is $25 but compared to SM19 it is about 60% less so it is very affordable. Thank you very much.
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My guess is that the reason SuperMemo has not provided the API for Anki is simply a technical issue.
Several years before FSRS came along, the medical group Anking and well-known developer Arthur Milchior negotiated the possibility of providing the API for SuperMemo’s algorithms. (The proposal included volunteer development for SM on the Anki side and a way to monetize it, so there would be a lot of profit for SuperMemo .)
However SuperMemo seems to have concluded it was too complicated and costly to change the algorithm for Anki and maintain and keep it up, so they could not do it. (In fact, they have only developed a Windows version of SuperMemo, so their development resources would not be very large.)
Plus, even if there were no such technical problems, they seemed to think that it was only the Anki authors who could develop such the API.
So I think the only person who can negotiate to incorporate SuperMemo API into Anki is Official Anki Damien Elmes, if he fully cooperates with the development, maybe it is possible. (And as you already know, Anki does not have the luxury of such development resources.)
Maybe a little off-topic, but yes, I was a fan of Dr. Piotr Wozniak and a user of SuperMemo. However, the user experience of SuperMemo is terrible, and Woz has diverted his attention from SuperMemo to student movement. So I stopped my promotion of SM18 two years ago. SM19 is a very minor improvement compared with SM18, that why I feel disappointed to Woz.
Back to the discussion of new landing page, I think it’s unnecessary to mention SuperMemo, like obsidian’s landing page doesn’t mention Zettelkasten. SuperMemo is actually the pioneer of modern spaced repetition, but few people know that. At least, Ebbinghaus and his forgetting curve is more famous than Woz in China. Only geek and techie would like to know the history of spaced repetition.
Here I want to recommend a good introduction of spaced repetition:
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I think the landing page is minimal, so I don’t think it is possible to add detailed explanations.
If introducing the Spaced Repetition, I think it would be good to put SM2 (Default), FSRS (Advanced), and V3 Scheduler (Other Assistance) side by side.
Like this.
I think any comparison should be on a secondary page, if needed. But there is no need to compare schedulers there. What’s important is to make people understand what spaced repetition is, not why this spaced repetition software is better than the others, in my opinion.
I believe using some of this comic or taking some of its images as a base (since it’s in the public domain) could work.
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