Spaced repetition systems have gotten better

I find with spaced repetition that it works really well for some well-known things like vocabulary (EDIT: well-known meant as "spaced repetition is well-known to work for this use-case, not well-known as "the subject is well understood"), medical etc. but for everything else it becomes a struggle for a long time.

I have been trying for years to fined a way to use it for mathematics and physics - with the former being more of a focus and didn't really get anywhere. For definitions it works, but it's quite hard to write proofs in a way where there is a short obvious memorization based answer. Either you spend far too much time on a card or the card gives you too much information so you don't really test the knowledge.

I also tried it for computer shortcuts - it seems to me that they are really useful only when part of the muscle memory - so practicing them works better then memorization.

i've learned entire math topics calc 1, calc2, calc3, statistics, linear algebra with anki. It's really easy. Just add the parctice problems at the end of the chapter to the front and the answer on the back.

I feel like its asking a lot to use flash cards to learn things that aren't about memorization.

> it works really well for some well-known things like vocabulary

And mathematics and physics, which are (at undergraduate level) even more well-understood than vocabulary.

It's someone I wondered, what is the point of memorizing a proof if it only ever proves something you already know. The answer is you hope it generalises. There is a possible way you can do it in SRS, being inspired by RL training. Instead of cards you'd show options within a game or simulation. But this would need a lot of expert knowledge for a single concept.

Sure, but if you are memorizing the proof instead of understanding it, you aren't going to be able to generalize it.

In general, math is not a subject where memorization is going to get you ahead. The "why" matters much more than the "what".

Yeah you're basically just using the algorithm to schedule review, just like going through old problem sets.

It's the next best thing to getting an infinite stream of new problems of a type of problem.

Math Academy provided a self-service learning system with a novel spaced repetition algorithm which could take the hierarchical body of math into account.