I recently went on a 3 day vacation and came back to the expected and
daunting 400 pile of reviews waiting for me. What I would like and I
am guessing other people would like to is a way to prepare for this by
doing a bunch of these before I leave.

What I am thinking is you tell Anki when you will leave and come back
and it takes all the cards due between this period and puts them at
the bottom of your review stack. I realise there is the problem that
this way cards can come up more than once.

EG you do a card that would have come up in 2 days and rate it 2, so
it will then fall again in the vacation period and thus should
immediately go back into the review pile. My idea is that a card can
only appear once. After you have passed it, then it will be scheduled
to appear again immediately after your vacation finishes with a
approiate penality to its maturity (?) depending on how long its
review was delayed.

I can think of a few different possible implementations, but something
that would allow diminishing the post vacation pile would be greatly
appreciated.

Someone else has been talking about this over the last few days.
Please search the forums.

Here's the badly named thread I jumped into the end of that Damien was
referring to:

http://groups.google.com/group/ankisrs/browse_thread/thread/68a9d3943...

I put it aside because I was going back to work soon and it didn't
seem like there was much immediate interest from the community. I'll
pick it up as I get time though.

My current thoughts are that there are two problems here:
 (1) starting cards when they can only end up in that heap
 (2) cards getting scheduled in the holiday period

1: I was hoping from the user assigning some probability they were
willing to take that new cards before the holiday would end up in that
pile. On rethinking though its going to be a pretty approximate
heuristic I end up putting together.

2: I'm thinking that the user can periodically (before there holiday)
run an algorithm that moves cards scheduled in the holiday to some
point before the holiday and appropriately handicaps that cards next
interval growth. I was just going to go with random reallocation
(between now and the start of the holiday) and then calculate the
handicap.

Like I said, I won't be touching this too much for a couple of weeks,
so if anyone has any ideas, feel free to put them out there.

On Jan 6, 10:28 am, "Damien Elmes" <resol...@gmail.com> wrote:

I also think that a "vacation mode" or some way to prevent the post-
vacation buildup of cards would be an essential tool to add to Anki.

First let me address the argument that "you don't stop forgetting even
when you are on vacation, so Anki doesn't stop scheduling cards."
While the first part may be true, this statement implies that the user
should ideally never take a break, and should always review their
cards at the optimum moment-the moment they come due. In fact, even
the most hard-core users rarely use Anki like this. Most people review
several hours after their cards are due, but the difference between
reviewing the moment the card becomes due and reviewing it three hours
later is negligible. This margin of error is probably very similar to
the margin of error in our own estimation of our ability to remember a
certain fact. So, basically even with normal usage of Anki, you are
bound to "fail" some cards- or should I say "mark as a 1." Actually,
the beauty of an SRS is that you never actually fail. You simply mark
it a 1 and review it again. You overestimated your ability to remember
that fact. Hardly a big deal compared to the vast majority of cards
that you don't need to review again. So, marking cards 1 is not really
a waste of time-but simply part of how the SRS works. An SRS doesn't
magically give you perfect memory, because an SRS is not perfect-
remembering 80 to 90% is more than enough.

On that note, here's how I envision a "vacation mode." Its simple.
Basically you just have to stop anki's clock stops.
When you go on vacation anki marks what time that is. When you come
out of vacation, anki marks that time, calculates the difference and
adds that difference to every card in the deck. So the cards are
technically "very overdue" but lets see what actually happens in this
situation.

The day after your vacation you have the same reviews you would have
had on the first day of your vacation. If you had done them the first
day of your vacation, you would have "passed" about 85% of them-that
is to say, given them a score of 2 or better. The other 15% you would
have scored a 1 and had to review two or three times in that one day.

Instead, you posponed these cards by a few days. That 85% of passed
cards falls to 70%, with a lower average score. The remaining 30% have
to be reviewed multiple times so, this day's review take a bit longer
than they would have otherwise, but it's nowhere near the epic
mountain of cards that you would have had they not been rescheduled.
For the next few days, all your review sessions take a bit longer than
they would otherwise, and you are forgetting slightly more than
average, but after a bit of time your reviews are pretty much back on
track naturally.

Make sense? Look, you're gonna forget some information no matter what
you do, so don't worry about it and take a break! Yes, yes put down
the SRS. It's OK. Your cards will still be there when you get back.

A way to automatically do this would be great, but what would be even
more useful is a way to manually reschedule cards. Supermemo had it.
Is there even a plugin for that? That seems like a pretty basic
feature for an SRS.

Thanks Damien. You're the man now, dog.

Benzhi

I've been updating the wiki docs today and I noticed that someone
posted an FAQ about this. Thanks to whoever did that. I tweaked it a
bit.

http://ichi2.net/anki/wiki/FrequentlyAskedQuestions#head-1c43f1ca6a41...

Damien-

I understand what you are saying, but I disagree with statements
like:

those 200 cards need to be reviewed soon or you'll forget them. There
is no way around this - the cards need to be studied or you'll forget.
The best thing you can do is put on some good music and get stuck into
the reviews, motivated by the knowledge that your hard work will pay
off in the future.

Just like Cramming, this style of studying is, in the long term,
counter-productive. It doesn't help you remember the cards any better-
all it does is demotivate you and stress you out. Basically, you're
saying that "you took a break and enjoyed life, now you must be
punished with... MORE CARDS!!!!" Look, i like SRSing and all, but I
don't like doing multiple-hour long SRS Cram sessions-especially when
I'm trying to catch up on any other work that I might have after a
vacation. The SRS should be the slave of the user, not the master.

If you took a break from using anki, the forgetting has already
happened. Nothing can be done. You can't reverse it by simply cramming
more cards into your head when you get back. In fact, forgetting is
happening all the time, even when we are using an SRS. Anki does not
prevent forgetting from happening. Let me repeat that. Anki does not
prevent forgetting from happening. SRSs merely offer a system to
reduce chance you will forget something over a long period of time. As
Khatzumoto from alljapaneseallthetime says:

SRS aren’t perfect, but if used correctly, then they promise retention
in the range of 90-95%, and in my experience, they do deliver. It’s
interesting to think that actually “letting go” — allowing that you
will forget 5-10% of what you learn, rather than being obsessed with
100% retention, has the counter-intuitive effect of leading you to
actually learn more.

Using an SRS should be a habit, right? Well let's compare it to
athletics. If you run regularly, ther'll be some days when you don't
make your running goal, and there'll be some days when you meet it,
and some days when you surpass it. That's pretty much how an SRS
works. Some days you don't do all your reviews, so the next day you
gotta push it a bit harder, but most days you do pretty much the same
amount. This is a good habit.

Now, pretend you go on vacation from running. You're gonna lounge on
the beach and show off that hot body you've been working on. When you
come back are you really gonna run all the distance that you "should
have" run while on vacation? If you go on a one week vacation, and
you're used to running 2 miles a day, after a week now you have 15
miles to run the day you get back. Pretty tough right? Ok, split it up
over the next week - you have run twice as much as normal if you want
to "make up" for what you didn't do. This might work for the toughest
runners, but most people would probably just simply want to get back
into the same groove they were in before-maybe pushing themselves a
little bit harder the day they get back!

I hope this analogy is clear enough. Sure, ideally you'd run the 15
miles, you'd do every rep you were supposed to do over the course of
the vacation, but its more likely to frustrate and cause people to
stop using an SRS altogether than get "motivated by the knowledge that
your hard work will pay off in the future."

Personally, this issue has made me want to stop using Anki entirely a
number of times, which may be no skin off your teeth, but I think this
functionality is vitally important for Anki. Please consider making a
manual card scheduling feature per my previous post. Thank you. You're
the man once again, dog.

Benzhi

Here's another analogy. Imagine you're in a Japanese class. You go
away for a week, and you miss the week's lessons. Do you put in more
effort to catch up on the material you've missed, or do you give up
and claim that the missed material is already lost to you? Do you tell
your boss that the week's work you missed will not get done, since you
were on holiday and you shouldn't have to do it?

Pausing is a commonly requested feature, and if there were some
sensible way to implement it I'd certainly be interested. As it
stands, I'm pretty convinced that the human mind will go to great
lengths to justify avoiding work.

That was me. You 'tweaked' it quite a lot. ;)

I preferred my version (as, of course, I would). I prefer explaining
things in full with examples rather than providing more succinct
explanations. You're pretty smart Damien so I guess you find long
explanations unnecessary and dull.

Here's the crucial paragraph that I wrote:

Consider taking a week long break and pausing the scheduler just
before you leave and un-pausing just after you come back. If one of
your cards was scheduled for review on January 15th before you paused
the scheduler, then its due date will change to January 22nd once you
un-pause. Every single card in your deck will have its due date
shifted by 7 days. This includes a card scheduled for review on
January 15th 2009 and a card scheduled for review on June 16th 2012.
Anki schedules cards for review based on a carefully designed
algorithm. If review of a card is delayed then the probability of
successfully answering that card decreases. Cards with small intervals
that were originally due for review on the date that the scheduler is
un-paused will be affected the most and the probability of answering
those cards correctly is very small. There will be little effect on
the card scheduled for 2012 because the delay is small relative to the
interval of the card. However, if you take several breaks during the
year and pause the deck many times, the card due for 2012 will be
delayed by the cumulative period of time that the scheduler is paused.
This could add up to a significant delay meaning that you fail a card
that you should pass easily.

There's some good information in there, but it was a very long
paragraph, and I was worried people wouldn't read it. I tried to make
it shorter and easier to read. If you still think it'd be useful,
could you add the example a little further down in the text? This is
such a commonly talked about item that it may end up needing its own
page and own Q&A! ^^;

The logical conclusion from this viewpoint is that you should fail
every single card that is due when you get back from a break and treat
them as new cards again. You can do this easily and quickly. If you
pause the scheduler, you will ruin the scheduling for all the cards in
your deck including the ones that aren't due yet and shouldn't be
affected by your time away.

The crucial point is that pausing affects every single card. If you
have a 2000 card deck and 200 cards are due, don't screw up all 2000
cards, just fail the 200 that are due if you consider them forgotten.

Of course, this is pretty extreme behaviour. You would be much better
off by working through the cards at your own pace. You'll probably
remember a decent portion of them. Thanks to recent developments with
Anki, you can still study new cards and you can alter the ordering of
the cards that are due.

I tried to write in a fashion that would convince people who engage in
debates on the forums. If they've got the time and feel strongly
enough to do that then presumably they've got the time to read a
lengthy paragraph. At least that was my thinking. I don't think many
people look at the FAQ when they haven't got a question.

However,

Agreed!

Rather than elaborating all the arguments, perhaps we can just link to
a few of these drawn out threads in the FAQ, and let the user read up
on it themselves.

In the class situation, you would naturally want to learn any *new*
information that was presented while you were away. This is different
than the SRS which is presenting old information that needs to be
reviewed.

As for a job, well, your boss is not going to ask you to put in an
extra 40-hour work week because you "missed it." Sure-theres some
catching up to do, but I don't think this is quite the same thing as
we are talking about with the SRS.

You know, up until now when I have taken a break from using Anki
(either out of necessity, or because I simply wanted to take a break),
I have faithfully put in all the reps that i needed to on the
following day. I don't avoid work. On that day i had about 600 reps
and i did all of them. It was not a feeling of conquering a mountain
or overcoming some personal challenge. It was joyless, masochistic
toil knowing that if I didn't do them today, I'd just be punished by
more tomorrow. After that day I was ready to delete Anki from my
system. But I didn't.

Pausing or pushing back reps-if done properly-isn't avoiding work, but
making work more do-able, more flexible.

Andrew's suggestion in the last paragraph of his post is pretty much
the same thing I'm talking about. When you put anki into "vacation
mode" it takes note of the date and time. When it comes out of
"vacation mode" it calculates the difference and adds that to all
active cards. Simple, right?

An even better addition would be a way to manually change the due
dates of cards. I know this goes against the Algorithm in anki, but I
think this will make Anki better and more useful. お願いを申し上げます

Benzhi

I realise that the burden of cards after a vacation is demotivating,
and I'd like to address it if there is a way. But delaying the entire
deck is a terrible solution.

At this point I don't think such a feature would be generally useful.
Come up with a better idea and I'll think about it. :-)

I'd like to offer my own take on this.

You go on vacation for two weeks.  While gone, you have someone walk
and feed your dog.  You come back and your dog is well fed and happy
to see you back.

But as to your learning process, no one can "feed the dog" while
you're away, unless you take Anki with you or do it via the web.

in my opinion, you should come back to a realistic view of what your
vacation has cost you.  So ...

I have an alternative suggestion:  simply prepare for your Anki
vacation before it happens:

1 - in the weeks prior to your vacation, watch your graphs carefully
to ascertain how many cards will be due when you are away.

2 - refrain from adding new material, or add less material, in order
that your back-up upon return will be less daunting.

In this scenario your work flow can remain manageable and realistic,
and more importantly, there's no possibility of any improper
adjustment to card intervals.

Which paragraph are you talking about? Everything I wrote was written
to try and demonstrate that what you're talking about is a bad idea.

On 1月7日, 午後6:23, Andrew <wrigh...@gmail.com> wrote:

One thing that working with an SRS has showed me is that forgetting is
not an on/off switch, it's a matter of probability over time. See:
http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/4/4e/ForgettingCu...
.

When I said "the forgetting has already happened" maybe that would
have been better stated: your chances to remember a given item have
already decreased. Your chances to remember it are less, true, but its
not as though you are definitely going to mark it a 1. When you don't
review a card in time, you don't "forget" it necessarily, you just
lessen your chances to remember it.

What I'm suggesting is that you just start over where you left off.
Your daily average pass rate will go down, the cards will be harder,
and the next few days will have more than average reviews, but soon
you'll be back on track. Marking every card as 1 and starting from
scratch is ridiculous! What a waste!

Look, the scheduler isn't perfect. It's an estimation of our memory,
at best. It's not like changing the scheduling of cards will "damage"
them.

Benzhi

You won't be back on track soon. You won't be back on track until you
answer every single card in your deck. Many of my cards are over 2
years away. I don't want to wait 2 years.

What's more, if I pause the deck regularly - maybe once every 3 months
- the card 2 years away will be delayed 8 times! If I take a week long
break every 3 months, the card two years away will be delayed by 8
weeks!

The scheduler isn't perfect, but you must think it's approximate
otherwise you wouldn't use Anki. Even an imperfect scheduler is
screwed up by pausing.

Ok,

Rescheduling the whole deck seems like the simplest solution, but
yeah, it's probably not necessary. I think the best answer would be a
way to manually change scheduling. But, for a "vacation mode" or some
"vacation" feature, you would, at least need to reschedule cards that
come due during the vacation time.

Here's how it works: Turn V-mode or whatever on. Anki marks the time
(time A). go to the beach. play volleyball with hot women. come back
to your cold apartment in japan. Turn V-mode or whatever off. Anki
marks the time (Time B).  Any cards that were due in that interval of
time are pushed back by the difference (i.e. B-A).  Now, you have
basically the same set of reviews you would have on the day you left,
plus any reviews that were already scheduled for the day you return.
You probably end up performing worse than usual, and the next day you
have a higher than average number of reviews to do, but it's not like
a weeks worth of reviews in one day.

How's that sound guys?

Benzhi

On 1月7日, 午後7:33, Benzhi <tom.newh...@gmail.com> wrote:

All that does is shift the work back and spread it out. You can do
that already with the postpone plugin.

There are a few problems with this.

1. If you take a break for a week and come back on January 20th, a
card scheduled for January 19th will appear on the January 26th. This
is 6 days late and it could have been reviewed only 1 day late on the
20th. This seems like missed opportunity.
2. If you think about the due cards graph, you're effectively cutting
out the portion during your break, and piling it on top of the portion
after you get back. The postpone plugin already does this and can do
it better by ordering the cards more appropriately.
3. If you have more time on one day and want to work through a lot of
cards, you won't be able to.

In the case of "rescheduling the whole deck" - which sounds extreme
but seems to me to be the most straightforward simple solution to the
problem programming-wise (thinking of you damien)

For a card that's two years away, if you reschedule it two or even
three weeks later the difference would be neglegible. It's not like
you will have it in your memory one week and have forgotten it
completely the next. With long term memories, the forgetting curve
tapers off even more slowly, so unless you're taking multiple month-
long vacations from studying, you don't need to worry about those long-
term cards. If you *are* taking multiple-month long vacations from
studying-well you should expect to be forgetting stuff!

Benzhi

On 1月7日, 午後7:46, Benzhi <tom.newh...@gmail.com> wrote:

Mistake. 7 days late.

The basic idea is to have a way to "pick up where i left off" as it
were-as though no time had passed, as though anki doesn't know I went
on vacation and neglected it for a couple of days.

You could also have an option to add half (or some portion of) the
difference to the cards - thus making about half the cards due on the
first day back.

Well, you could have some way to reverse the order of those "vacation
cards," but actually I don't think this is necessary. In the case of
that card due on january 19th- pretend you saw it on the day before
you left (the 12th) and anki scheduled it a week later - on the 19th.
If anki is scheduling that card with the space of a week its already a
mature card, and your chances of "passing it" on the 19th are probably
80%. If you delay it by an extra week, the chances won't decrease
significantly- maybe to 70% which is still relatively high. For the
majority of cards, which will be due in the first days of your
vacation, this wont' be a problem.

Postpone does an OK job i think- ive used it a few times. As far as
ordering the cards- I'm pretty sure it just keeps them in the same
order. I guess I feel that the user should be able to change the due
dates of cards when necessary. Which is why I'm pushing for this
feature needs to be implemented.

This is kind of the same argument that many people have had about what
to do when they get to the end of their deck. I mean I personally
think that Anki shound not prevent you from reviewing ahead, but
that's another barrel of fish. Plus it's the same way with the pospone
plugin, i believe.

Benzhi

Unless you went on a really long vacation (clearly a proportional
length) without computer access or stupidly learnt a lot of cards
before leaving. In that case, in my experience, your better of
resetting your progress on any items with a relatively short
interval...

On Jan 7, 6:23 pm, Andrew <wrigh...@gmail.com> wrote: