How best to implement randomisation into Anki

I don’t think there is anything inherently wrong with your approach at all. While normally, Anki cards are a 100%-system, asking you to recall everything the card contains, randomization can work as well if you ask me. I only use it for different audio examples at this point, which is more clearly simple and without downsides.

In my opinion, consolidating the knowledge is important and your approach to integrating this is a great idea in itself. Another advantage is that the users may learn incrementally, not being required to learn exact values immediately, but learn by practice and narrow down the thresholds over time.

Single note implementation: With this, you risk that a user who can correctly answer all examples but one will pass on Anki and not be shown this particular example in time, leaving them thinking they don’t have a gap in their knowledge. This is a question of review intervals and numbers of combinations: The higher, the more likely this is. But since review intervals grow exponentially, you’ll likely run into this risk, especially if you have more than just 2 or 3 different cases. You’ll have to adjust the parameters so that one card can cover that much content. Users may also become frustrated if they know 99% of cases and the other 1% keep on requiring the card to be repeated. The cases may have different Ease, after all. But maybe this is also beneficial for you, because certain conditions are much less likely than others. It may make sense to look at the likelihood of each card and set them systematically.

Multiple notes implementation: This is, of course, less elegant and efficient to implement, but more accurate and rigorous in its results. For multiple variables, I wouldn’t want to use this. Also, you lose the advantage of being able to control the likelihood of each case, if you want that. On the other hand, it will give each example a different Ease, which is more appropriate than handling them as one in my eyes.

I think both approaches are promising and you should test it. Personally, I’m the type of person who would want the multi-note version. Also, what you are trying to achieve reminds me of Cloze cards, in which the number of cards is dynamic and dependent on the number of keywords in the note. It seems to me that you want a similar, but different thing: From a set of n examples, you want to make n cards. And n may be a combination of examples taken from two different dimensions: n = a * b. Maybe developing or searching for an add-on that adds such a card type would solve your problem (and those of other people!), then you’d have the multiple notes implementation without having to create multiple notes. This most closely aligns with the spirit of Anki, I believe. I assume here that you want the user to learn all examples, else this makes no sense.

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