Thank you for this. Maybe its about time to implement compound sorting order in Anki 
@dae What are your thoughts on this
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I’ve proposed just having 3-4 default sorts and “Custom”, Dae didn’t like that idea
Call this new sort order “default”. Make it the new default. Users don’t have to know what default means.
That sounds horrible
you didn’t do PSG_desc … potential stability gain
wait, what am I seeing? R desc is horrible at efficiency. difficulty_desc is so much more optimal though…
D ascending you mean? Descending D is at the very bottom
Well, this is quite logical. If you use ascending D as the sort order, it means that you are effectively never doing the harder cards. Since harder cards require more reviews, the total study time would be less in this case.
But, this sort order doesn’t look like a great default to me. A user may be using Anki with the goal of improving his retention of harder cards. The easier facts may not even require using Anki in the first place.
What do you think about desc. S + asc D, card["stability"] * (11 - card["difficulty"])?
desc_S_asc_D seems to combine the best of both worlds (Difficulty Ascending and Retrievability Descending). But to make everything fair. I suggest rebenchmarking adjusted for FSRS 6 and not 5 for all sorting orders..
I suggest a reevaluation of what is considered to be the best sorting order. @Expertium
Also would changing the order of sorting have an influence
- Like sorting by ascending difficulty then sort by stability descending
- Or sorting by stability descending then difficulty ascending
This is already with FSRS-6
…
If a sort order has descending S, it means that cards with low stability (e.g. those that were introduced recently or those that were failed recently) will have low priority.
This is good/acceptable if your goal is just to retain what you learnt a long time back. But, it is horrible if you want to continuously learn new things.
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But you could say the same thing about Descending Retrievability, you are only seeing cards you are most likely to recall at the start.
R is very different from S and D.
R is essentially a measure of how much time has elapsed since the last review of the card relative to its stability.
The R depends neither on how hard the information is nor on how long ago the card was introduced. (at least not directly)
That being said, I personally don’t like the descending R sort order very much. The reason being that it over-penalizes the cards having small S that are slightly overdue (due to a backlog). See examples in Ordering Request: Reverse Relative Overdueness - #508 by vaibhav
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But simulations say otherwise. Are you saying that the simulations are unreliable
I think I posted the graph in the github issue but I can’t find it now. Richard’s simulations show more cards are stuck in a low R region if you keep using that R_desc sort order. So, another thing to keep in mind.
@Expertium That being said, what is the best sorting order overall and when you have a backlog
That would depend on fundamentals that we often don’t agree on right? Like politics…
Edit: Okay, so what I meant is we don’t have common ground in deciding these things. So like when I asked expertium about sort orders a long time ago he said he won’t even discuss it with me if I first don’t agree that maintaining DR should be a goal in Anki. And I don’t agree maintaining DR is always a good goal.
Idk.
For maintaining retention at the desired level? R desc.
For the least amount of seconds per card? R asc.