Will's blog

Posted by Phil on Fri Sep 10 08:50:02 2004
> It's a game I like to call, "I don't want to be studying--I want to be programming".
Heh, I remember playing that game with SQL--in the end I decided better 5% studying than 0% studying, whatever gets you to study a little... :-)

--Phil.

Posted by Patrick Hall on Fri Sep 10 23:36:12 2004
Heh, that URL is my soon-to-be conversion to Pyblosxom ;)

Anyway, neat app!

You know, when I was learning Japanese characters, I got this book about memorizing the Kana (there are two sets of fifty). There is an appendix that explains a very cool way to memorize things, and it's funny to run across your app because I was thinking about how to code the technique up.

Basically, the idea was that you have you want to maximize the amount of time you spend on words that are hard for you to remember. It describes using index cards and a box, but of course it could be modeled with a data structure.

The card box is divided into a number of sub-boxes, more or less logarithmic-looking, in increasing size, like this:

|_|_|____|_______|

and you fill up the first compartment with cards until it's full. Then, you go through that set. If you remember a card, you can move it into the next container up. When there's space in the first container, you can add more -- but once the second container is filled up with learned cards, before you can move them into the third container, you have to check them again.

If you fail to remember, they go back into the first container.

The advantage is that the interval between checking the cards becomes greater and greater -- by the time a card finally gets into the last, big subcontainer, it's probably in your long-term memory.

I found it worked pretty well... but back in those days I didn't program. Anyway, it seems like something that would be easy to implement with a modified stack class.

Cheers,
Pat