Some background. I converted FSRS a few months ago from the SM2 scheduler. The converted decks have been around for a few years before switching. I’ve optimized it recently, and it says the fit is this: “Log loss: 0.3034, RMSE(bins): 3.14%”.
My maximum interval is set to 100 years lol.
The card pictured is mature, and when I passed it yesterday it showed that it would have a 10y interval. Now today, it’s back for review. My first thought is that it might be related to having a card backlog of around 140 days past due, but even then I still don’t understand how that could cause this behavior.
Does anyone have any ideas? Have I FUBARed my deck? I recently made the cards much harder by taking away hints that were harming my ability to actually recall the vocabulary I’m trying to study, and because of that my recent retention is pretty abysmal.
I realize this could be normal FSRS behavior that I just don’t have a good understanding of, but I’m really puzzled by it. Happy to provide any other settings that might be relevant.
Do you sync multiple devices? This mismatch – some of the Card Info knows about the review yesterday, some doesn’t – is almost always caused by a sync conflict.
Are you strict about making sure you sync when you open the app AND when you close/leave the app, on every device, every time? If not, when Anki merges conflicting data, the most recent changes can dictate the state of the card. In this case, that could be that at some point after you studied the card – 12 Jan 21:31 – but before you synced that review history, you made some change to the note/card on another device.
mistcurve:
I do. I try to be careful about the syncing though… Is there any way to confirm that this is the cause? I’m not sure if there’s a merge conflict log for syncing or something similar.
There isn’t a log. If you really want to check this card, you can search it up using the Card ID in your screenshot – Searching - Anki Manual .
I would first look at the Note Modified and Card Modified times, and compare those to that study-time in the Card Info. In the most simple scenario, Card Modified would match that time (because it is updated when the study is recorded), and Note Modified would be before that time. Are you seeing anything different than that?
Another thing to consider are add-ons that make bulk modifications to cards, like automatically rebuilding Filtered decks.
To update this thread, yes. I believe it was a sync error after looking through the modified times, along with the times of an automatic backup this morning. Specifically, I hadn’t synced my ankidroid before syncing my desktop, and then when syncing one of the two after that the error occurred.
I wonder if this discrepancy between the two versions is something that could either be fixed in the merge logic, or warn the user and prompt a one directional change.
There’s the rub – it’s not really a discrepancy. Anki assumes that the most recent change is the one that best represents your intention.
Picture a simpler situation – you edit a note on AnkiDroid and italicize a word, then 6h later you’re at your computer without having synced that change. You don’t see that formatting, and can’t remember whether you italicized or underlined, but that’s okay because underlining would be better with this font, and it should be that whole line, not just one word. When you sync those up, it’s not an unmergeable conflict (which is what one-way syncs are required to deal with), so Anki will first apply the update from AnkiDroid, and then apply the update from desktop to replace it.
The reason this ends up out-of-whack is that the card state is saved when the card is updated, so due date in August, 1.51y interval, 10 reps, etc. all ends up in the final version.
It sounds like you already reverted and redid things, so maybe this idea is coming too late [and I haven’t tried it, so it’s a bit theoretical] – if you have the FSRS Helper add-on, you can select any card (or group of cards) in Browse and have FSRS re-assess its schedule.
Since that process looks at the review history anew, I wonder if that would put this card instantly in the right state? It won’t hurt to try it with one card. Take a look at the Card Info before/after to see what changed, and if you don’t like it, you can Edit > Undo right away.