Anki: Memorization with Spaced Learning - <AUTHOR> https://apps.ankiweb.net/ <comment><USER3> Also worth reading is the excellent (and pretty extensive) article by Michael Nielsen[1] showcasing how he used Anki to create an in-depth knowledge about AlphaGo.

Personally, I've used Anki to keep remembering/revisiting the concepts that I use for a while and then move onto something else. Common APIs of programming languages and their standard libraries is one such area. I've found that while it's not really difficult to learn and get into the flow of using a programming language (or history, mathematics, physics for that matter), it's more difficult to try using the same knowledge after a break of few months.

My main language at work is C# and Web Development, but I keep trying to learn other languages and domains in my free time. If I do not use the knowledge for a few months, I forget everything. But with Anki I have to just open the app for around 10 minutes a day and it helps me to recall such concepts in a timely fashion.

I would suggest everyone who has the time and faces similar issues should give it a shot.

[1] [http://augmentingcognition.com/ltm.html](http://augmentingcognition.com/ltm.html)

<comment><USER4> This article is the best summarization of real, everyday usage of Anki outside of language learning and medical studies which are common uses of Anki. Reviewing flash cards is the highest leverage 10-15 minute habit I have besides planning my day. There's a certain joy and relief from having a reasonable confidence new information will be readily available to you for years to come. Much knowledge is better absorbed through practice, conversation, and writing. If you can distinguish between what you can learn through flash cards, and what you can absorb through other practices and not conflate the two too much—you'll be in a great place.

Some categories of cards I have that may serve as inspiration for others wishing to get into flash cards..

      * Basic information about countries e.g. population
      * Ingredients and dishes from restaurant menus I didn't know
      * Important people and places
      * History facts (typically from Kindle highlights)
      * Conversions between units (e.g. lbs to kg)
      * Season for various vegetables and fruits
      * Keyboard shortcuts for vim, readline, etc.
      * Learning words and terms I don't know from Kindle/Instapaper highlights
      * Useful statistics

<comment><USER5> Is there a convenient workflow for kindle highlights - > flashcards?

<comment><USER6> [https://github.com/neingeist/kindle-to- anki](https://github.com/neingeist/kindle-to-anki)

<comment><USER7> that's a webscraper not an official api though, reading through it uses beautifulsoup.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> I've used Anki over the past 8 years or so very successfully. I strongly recommend it to anyone learning a language. Here are some tips to get the most out of it:

* Only put things you know into Anki. An individual Anki card should feel a little too easy when you make it.

* Put in words with a good amount of context. Avoid single words as much as possible. The quickest way to do this is to just input the sentence from the book/TV where you learned the word. You'll learn collocations and grammar structures by doing this.

* Delete cards when they give you trouble. Language learning is a marathon, if the word is important you'll see it again. If you keep getting a card wrong then you probably didn't actually learn it in the first place, or the card is written in a confusing way.

* Avoid the temptation to input huge lists of words automatically. Lots of beginners download "3000 Most Common Words", put them all into Anki and then give up within a few weeks. A language is much more than just a list of words.

<comment><USER9> Sounds like the way you use Anki is more of a learning supplementary rather than a singular tool? Like you are learning of words elsewhere and entering them into Anki for memorization once you have learned about them?

I'm just curious. I'd like to use Anki to get better at reading and playing chords (on keyboard / piano) from symbol notation but I haven't started yet. Would you recommend learning each chord one by one and entering them into Anki as I learn them?

<comment><USER8> I think that's a very fair assessment of how I use Anki. I think if you spend all your time using Anki and no time interacting with the actual language you're learning you won't get very far. Basically every sentence I put into Anki comes from a book, movie, TV show or conversation.

The question about piano chords is really interesting. I often compare learning a language to learning to play the piano. Both are real time skills that require _practice_ , to just learning. I meet someone who loves reading grammar books I say "You can read a book on piano construction 100 times and you won't learn to play the piano.

As for your case, what is the skill you want to learn? Playing the chords right? Then that has to form the main focus of your practice. By all means, use Anki to help memorise chord names and chord patterns but be careful: You might just get really good at seeing a chord and saying it's name rather than seeing a chord and playing it!

Also, sight-reading is a very real-time skill. You have to read those chords and then play them on the right beat. If you practice chords with Anki you might get good at seeing them in Anki and then playing them a few seconds later, but it's not the same as doing it in real time.

<comment><USER9> So true. My goal with learning to play chords from symbols is to look at a chord progression and be able to play it without too much trouble. Not really for performance or anything, but to help with composition.

So perhaps a good approach would be to do the Anki spaced learning sessions in front of the keyboard and actually play the chord as the answer. I may not become a great real time sight reader, but being able to see a chord like C+9 / C95 and be able to play it a second or two later should be good enough.

Thanks for the advice.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> I'm always a little confused when I see articles on the internet extolling the virtues of spaced repetition learning. I don't doubt that it's a good way to memorize things; it's just that I have never really found that _memorization_ was ever an obstacle to my ability to learn something. I've always found that retention proceeds from _understanding_.

Time spent flicking through flashcards for vocabulary or formulae or chemical paths or whatever seems like a poor substitute for time spent reading material that uses the vocabulary, explains the derivation of the formulae, or describes the chemical process, or whatever...

Is this just about passing tests, or is this genuinely how other people approach learning?

<comment><USER11> > _poor substitute for time spent reading material that uses the vocabulary_

You can't effectively read material without having enough vocabulary to cover at least some 80% of it.

My most recent language learning experience is Japanese. The difference between trying to read before cramming on an ~8000 word vocabulary and after is night and day.

And the comparison basis here is not reading hardcopy, but electronic text with the help of an instant dictionary lookup tool (hover the mouse over anything to get to the reading and meanings instantly). That is to say, even with that tool, which eliminates some of the barriers of the writing system, trying to read is still like pulling teeth compared to the experience when you're crammed on a decent chunk of vocab.

Vocab gets you to that point where you can guess the meanings of unknown words from context, as well as their readings. You can start using mono-lingual dictionaries and other resources.

Now if you're coming from, say, one European language to another, you may be able to get away without using spaced repetition, because of a lot of shared vocabulary (cognates) and concepts.

In any case, brute force reading _is_ spaced repetition. It's just inefficient spaced repetition that fails to schedule the appearance of a word based on your recall performance for that specific word.

<comment><USER12> >electronic text with the help of an instant dictionary lookup tool (hover the mouse over anything to get to the reading and meanings instantly)

Can you tell me what text you were reading and what tool you were using? This sounds like exactly what I have been looking for my japanese learning.

<comment><USER13> Not the OP, but the reality is that you can read anything that interests you. Especially when you are starting, the first few thousand common words are incredibly common. So you'll get those over and over and over again. The main problem is that depending on what grammar is present, you may have difficulties.

There is something called the "natural order hypothesis" that states that the order in which people acquire the grammatical structures of a language is roughly the same, no matter what order the grammar is introduced. This is one of Stephen Krashen's hypotheses that has some good evidence in trials.

So the problem is that if you pick a piece that has a lot of grammar that you haven't acquired yet, you'll be spinning your wheels for a long time. The solution to this is simply to move on and find something else to read.

As for tools, the rikaichan plug in in Firefox and the Chromium port (rikaikun) are the main ones. There are lots of children's stories on the internet. Search for 昔話. You'll find lots to read :-) If you're a bit more advanced, then news is always good. TBS news is nice because they always give you both the video and audio along with the text (which is invariably exactly the same as what's in the video): [http://news.tbs.co.jp/](http://news.tbs.co.jp/)

But you can even read Twitter or and other social medium. I spent a long time reading the Ruby dev list in Japanese to learn computer terms. Good luck on your studies!

<comment><USER12> Thanks a lot for the tips. Really appreciate it.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> I've been using Anki since 2013 (almost 5 years). One really nice thing about Anki is that it has analytics. I currently have 4532 cards and my numbers are 99.18% correct answers for "Learning" (very young) cards, 98.44% for Young cards and 92.52% for Mature cards. No way I would be able to remember over 4000 pieces of information without spaced repetition. I truly believe this is the best learning "hack" there is. I've wrote about my experience here: [https://www.blinkingcaret.com/2016/05/04/hack-your-brain- lea...](https://www.blinkingcaret.com/2016/05/04/hack-your-brain-learn-faster- better/)

</comment><comment><USER15> I've been using Anki for some time and I love it but it's not a perfect tool. What I especially like is it's flexibility when it comes to designing flashcards. You can adjust colors, font-sizes and pretty much every visual aspect using css code. You can even embed your own font within a deck, which can come in handy when you are dealing with Japanese kanji (Printed and handwritten kanji sometimes differ and iPhone contains only "printed" versions of kanji fonts. I searched online for a "handwritten" font and embedded it into my decks).

There are cons too. The flexibility comes at the price - while reviewing the flashcards is smooth and easy, creating a deck can be very frustrating - <USER2> interface is not the most user-friendly. I ended up creating decks in Excel, exporting to csv and importing in Anki. That made the whole process much easier but I still had to jump through some hoops to achieve that.

Another problem (with the algorithm, not Anki itself) is that it's very easy to forget what you've just learned if you don't keep using the app. It's super easy to learn hundreds of vocabulary within a short period of time and pass the exam, but you need to keep reviewing the deck for at least a year, otherwise you'll forget it as quickly as you've learned it.

<comment><USER16> > Another problem (with the algorithm, not Anki itself)

My main gripe with the algorithm is you can't take weekends off. I used Anki a lot in College, and Mondays where terrible, due to the backlog built-up over the weekend.

One could also say, one shouldn't be drinking the weekend away ...

<comment><USER17> Actually, it's mentioned several times in the docs that you shouldn't think that backlog build-up means you have to crunch―or more specifically, IMO, 'backlog' isn't a thing here at all. If you can only put in thirty minutes a day, then do it and then close the app, this doesn't change because of a missed day. The cards will be there the next day, it's not like they catch fire when you skip a session. Stressing over the backlog would likely only make your mind work worse.

Instead, change the limit of cards to review to the number that you can get through in the time you have.

(Unless your college schedule requires you to actually crunch some number of cards every day? I don't know if that's a thing, but using spaced repetition in such a case would seem ill-fitting anyway.)

<comment><USER16> > Instead, change the limit of cards to review to the number that you can get > through in the time you have.

I actually brought this up with the devs. The way Anki counts this limit is just how many draws from the stack. A better way (and much more intuitively aligned with the wording) to count this, would be to limit the size of the stack you draw from.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> I use supermemo, and the vast majority of my collection isn't language related. For languages, something like clozemaster, supermemo.com, or premade anki decks/courses are fine.

I still find it odd that the only two groups of people who seem to use the software a lot are med students and language learning enthusiasts.

Supermemo is really buggy, and the website is extremely disorganized, but has a lot of useful information on it. The main reason I use it is its incremental reading function. Essentially, you can import articles, and turn them into flashcards in one swoop, while still having access to the full text via built in search (if you choose).

For example, I just finished importing most of the CSS reference [1]. And it only took me ~10 minutes to open the tabs and import them into Supermemo. Each page will get whittled down into flashcards over the next few weeks.

As others have stated, my srs usage is actually quite a small portion of my day, and extremely high leverage.

The hardest skill to learn is learning how to make flashcards properly [2]. I almost exclusively rely on cloze deletions now.

I do my repetitions in the morning when my memory is still fresh.

[1] [https://developer.mozilla.org/en- US/docs/Web/CSS/Reference](https://developer.mozilla.org/en- US/docs/Web/CSS/Reference)

[2] [https://www.supermemo.com/en/articles/20rules](https://www.supermemo.com/en/articles/20rules)

<comment><USER17> There's a plugin for Anki for incremental reading: [https://github.com/luoliyan/incremental- reading](https://github.com/luoliyan/incremental-reading)

(Though I'm not sure how the internal database structure works with that, I think you can't save the whole text along with a deck instead of individual notes―but maybe addons can change that.)

<comment><USER18> I tried it awhile ago, and it didn't work well, but I'll try it again. Incremental reading is kind of finicky to get right. Incremental reading is the real draw of these programs for me, and Supermemo (despite it's flaws) is kind of the only one that has a decent implementation of it.

<comment><USER3> That's my story as well. I tried the Anki plugin and didn't find it as per my taste.

Now incremental reading for me is a multi-monitor and multipass approach. One monitor has Anki, the other has the thing I'm reading. I keep on reading and keep noting down questions.

I've also come to realise that the context is totally different when I frame a question during reading, and when I revisit the same question later. A lot of times I have to clean-up the question: perhaps add a little more context, change wording etc. so it becomes a bit easier to answer.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> I couldn't imagine learning a language without Anki. I had to learn Coptic in a month, which required memorizing the most common ~1000 words in the language. Anki made this as easy as it can be. I don't think I would have been able to meet my deadline had I been making paper flashcards or using some more informal system.

The nice thing about Anki is that you can use it at any time without any overhead associated with beginning or ending your session. There are so many scraps of time in my day (on the bus, waiting for someone to meet me, waiting for my food to heat up in the microwave, walking to the store, etc.) that are mostly only useful for being a zombie on my phone, enjoying my surroundings, or being alone with my thoughts, which are all also sometimes appropriate uses of the time, but in all of these times, I can also just pull out my phone and start reviewing my cards, even if I get in just a few.

<comment><USER20> What was your list of the most common ~1k words? Do you have a link?

<comment><USER19> This is an Anki deck that was made from the book I used: [https://ankiweb.net/shared/info/1657789477](https://ankiweb.net/shared/info/1657789477)

I made my own Anki deck because this deck didn't have tags by chapter, and I wanted to study only the words I'd been exposed to so far.

<comment><USER20> Thanks for that - do you know if there is a way to export the list of words without going through the full process of installing Anki? I'm interested in different people's concept of "the thousand most useful words" and would love to extract the list you've used. It seems like it would be less overall work for you to do it than for me to do it, although I realise I'm asking you to do work.

Thanks.

<comment><USER19> Looks like the APKG format is a SQL dump[0], so perhaps, depending on how determined you are. My cards wouldn't be too useful as they are because many cards contain English prompts ("Which verb forms must have their direct objects incorporated into bound states?"), and the cards that do contain words have various inconsistencies depending on the part of speech, such as lemma- like forms that you would never see in an actual text as-is for prepositions, or multiple conjugation bases for verbs. So yeah, it'd be a hassle to put it into a normalized format. Sorry about that.

Not sure what the nature of your interest is, but I'm sure you must be familiar with what a Swadesh list[1] is? It's only a couple hundred instead of a thousand, and the words (or rather, their meanings) are chosen in advance, but it's a close concept.

[0]: [http://decks.wikia.com/wiki/Anki_APKG_format_documentation](http://decks.wikia.com/wiki/Anki_APKG_format_documentation)

[1]: [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Swadesh_list](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Swadesh_list)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> I really like the idea of spaced repetition learning, but it's the little details that are driving me crazy.

I cannot get Anki working on Raspberry Pi. (I have a Raspberry Pi connected to a TV in front of my rowing machine so I can study while I'm exercising.) I tried Mnemosyne but I can't get the sync server working, and I'm disappointed in the formatting options provided. I tried org-drill but adding images to cards is quite difficult.

Right now I'm working on writing some Javascript that can be plugged into web pages to provide the spaced repetition functionality. That way I would have the full capability of html5, css3, javascript, etc. Syncing would be handled by whatever file syncing software the user preferred. Creating/editing cards would be by whatever workflow the user wanted.

If anybody has any other solutions to the problems I'm having (running Anki on Raspberry Pi, Mnemosyne syncing/formatting, etc), I'm ready to listen.

<comment><USER22> Have you tried just going to the website [https://ankiweb.net/decks/](https://ankiweb.net/decks/) and reviewing your cards there? It should work on any device with a browser including your RasberryPi.

<comment><USER21> I tried going to the Anki website and I discovered another thing that I don't like about Anki. I went to one of my old decks and tried one of the cards; the spacing options for this card were <10 minutes, 1, 2 and 6 YEARS. I'd really like more control over the spacing of the card presentations.

<comment><USER23> You can actually change that up all in the settings (even on a per deck basis). It takes a bit of tinkering because it's not clear from the beginning what each setting does. Typically if I get something wrong I reset it to 20% of its previous time (so if it was a month since I saw it last I'd see it in around 6 days).

I'd trust the system though. Typically once you get to the point where you won't see it for more than a year you're highly unlikely to forget the content anyway. Although it depends on what you're trying to learn. The default settings are optimised for learning Japanese.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER24> I used Anki for about a year, and it definitely didn't work for me. Going through and remembering the answers was always a struggle. I only ended up with 36 cards -- the idea of making a bunch for every person I meet and book I read would overload my memory like crazy.

My memory has always been really good at indexing "what's the word for that", "there is an algorithm for this called X", "the keyboard shortcut for this is Y", "there is something weird about the way Z works in situation W". But it's index only, and I have to look up the content every time. At least since I turned 35 and realized I was forgetting the answer to every problem I'd solved before.

It's been 2.5 years and I don't remember the answers to any questions. Maybe using it for precise definitions is the wrong way, as that might be more like remembering 20 things in a row. I had questions like

Q: What is type erasure? A: Java implements generic types by deleting them. It does a compile-time check that your types match, then replaces the types with their bounds (eg, when T extends Number) or with Object.

I have retained a vague, but not precise knowledge of what type erasure is. I know exactly what to do when I program something that uses it. But even Anki can't give me the kind of sharp memory you might need for a job interview or quiz.

It's so easy for me to learn things by working with them. Hundreds of concepts, functions, keywords, and strategies a year, more than all my colleagues. I tried to memorize the things I _don 't_ use every day. It was unpleasant and that made it unsuccessful.

<comment><USER25> Your answer doesn't answer the question. You ask what type erasure is and then answer with some very specific information on Java's generics. Nothing in your question indicates that it's about Java or generics.

> Maybe using it for precise definitions is the wrong way, as that might be > more like remembering 20 things in a row.

This is exactly what it can be like. The 20 rules from SuperMemo are really useful for trying to formulate and transform the cards.

[https://www.supermemo.com/en/articles/20rules](https://www.supermemo.com/en/articles/20rules)

<comment><USER24> It's always odd how failing at most things leads me to ask "how am I doing this wrong?" and overcome, but I never asked this about Anki. Thanks for the link.

I was not aware till this moment that type erasure was something that C++ also has. I thought it was a specific gotcha for Java like the whole "no == for Strings" thing. In that context, I've only seen it connected to generics.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER26> I've had huge success using Anki in taking required professional exams. I'm in finance, so at various times I've had to take the JSDA, the Series 56, and Series 65.

I originally signed up for a Kaplan class for the 65, thinking it was going to be a cram class. In reality, it turned out to be a review class. Halfway through the first day on Monday, I told the teacher I hadn't started reviewing the material yet for the test on Friday. He said I was essentially a lost cause, and I should sign up to take the test again in a month.

I immediately left the classroom and spent the rest of the day entering every question from the practice exams into Anki. I spent 8-10 hours the next 3 days doing nothing but running Anki questions. On Friday, I crushed the exam.

Other useful things I've learned with Anki include the Number Major System and the answers to a bunch of those useless "brainteaser" interview questions.

</comment><comment><USER27> Is there a popular repository of shared Anki decks other than [https://ankiweb.net/shared/decks/](https://ankiweb.net/shared/decks/)?

<comment><USER28> Not that I know of, but I recommend making your own decks. Two reasons: you only add what you're interested in learning as you're reviewing material and figuring out how to make the cards for your material helps learning.

<comment><USER29> I recently started a new job, and wrote a quick script that scrapes a slack team for all the names and profile photos and creates an Anki deck out of it. I'm usually terrible with names and faces so this helped me immensely.

<comment><USER30> Do you mind sharing the script? Because the company I work for has grown at an insane rate - and there are a good 300+ coworkers I don't know. It'd be nice to know peoples' faces for when I see them walking around the building.

<comment><USER29> [https://github.com/philsnow/slanki](https://github.com/philsnow/slanki)

<comment><USER30> Thank you very much!

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER31> Anki is great, but it's easy to use wrong. It can't be overstated how important it to design your flashcards well. Do it wrong and you'll quickly be frustrated and overwhelmed by the work you have to put towards memorizing the info.

The best guidelines I've found on writing flashcards are Supermemo's 20 rules: [https://www.supermemo.com/en/articles/20rules](https://www.supermemo.com/en/articles/20rules). Honestly, this is a seminal work that anyone jumping into SRS or flashcards in general should read.

I also found this recent discussion about spaced repetition on HN to be very helpful: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17706776](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17706776)

As far as Anki itself is concerned: Make sure to check out some of the add-ons that are out there – they can really improve your workflow and motivate you to keep on going: [https://ankiweb.net/shared/addons/](https://ankiweb.net/shared/addons/)

</comment><comment><USER32> Anki has become the de-facto standard for memorizing the large swaths of information required during medical school. Not everyone uses it, but pretty much everyone that does and sticks to it sees impressive results.

<comment><USER33> > _Not everyone uses it, but pretty much everyone that does and sticks to it > sees impressive results._

This is another way of say "everyone that it works for gets good results"

<comment><USER22> It's interesting to note in studies comparing spaced repetition vs. massed learning, when students are asked afterward which method works better, they more often choose massed even though their own test results favor spaced repetition[0]. The upshot is people can use spaced repetition, it can "work" (in the sense that they remember the material better and test better) yet still drop it thinking massed practice to be superior.

[0][https://www.gwern.net/docs/spacedrepetition/2001-simon.pdf](https://www.gwern.net/docs/spacedrepetition/2001-simon.pdf)

</comment></comment></comment><comment> ainar-g For anyone who wants to use spaced repetition for learning languages, I recommend Clozemaster[1]. It uses the cloze deletion technique and has thousands of sentences for most languages. Using it has significantly improved my German.

[1] [https://www.clozemaster.com/](https://www.clozemaster.com/)

[2] [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cloze_test](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cloze_test)

<comment><USER15> Interesting, I just tried it for Japanese. But too often I could fill in a word without understanding it (there's often only one grammatical form that fits). Also each sentence is accompanied by English translation which feels a little bit like cheating ;) Does the method still works even with the translation available?

<comment> ainar-g It works, but you can actually disable the translation in the settings, or make it show _after_ you've answered.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER34> I use Anki everyday for medical school and for personal learning-- geography, notes from books I've read, research ideas I've thought up I want to review later, etc.

If you put in the time (I do at least 45 minutes of Anki a day, which turns out to be roughly 300 cards, 50+ of which are new) and you're consistent, the volume of information you can retain is truly staggering.

I have a retention rate of 90.1% and I've learned 15000 cards over the last 16 months.

About 2000 of those cards are my own-- the rest are fromv arious premade medical decks. Using premade decks is perfectly fine, but you do need to make you get a first pass of the material through some other method first-- Anki is not ideal for learning material, just retaining it.

Mnemonics can be successfully integrated into Anki cards-- but I think they're best for information that's easily confused with other bits or for really tedious stuff. Example: remembering which random medical drug is best for which genetic mutation, or which chromosome is mutated in which disease. Stuff like that is just pure tedium-- so translate it into images with the Major Mnemonic System or into memorable images like Sketchy Microbiology does.

</comment><comment><USER35> It seems there's a lot of evidence spaced repetition is an effective learning aid. Two things come to mind:

First, some times I see ppl calling spaced repetition a "trick" or "hack" (I read "shortcut"), but the truth is, using SRS actually entails a lot of work! [0] It seems a pretty important part of the process is to formulate your own cards, which also puts more emphasis in understanding first and memorizing later [1]. SRS is a hack to memorize as much as going to the gym is a hack to gain muscles...

Second some ppl object that "memorizing is not understanding", but I think better recall aids in faster learning, so one feeds the other. [1], again, talks about this: one should only strive to remember what one has already understood. OTOH, a lot of types of knowledge requires mostly memorization. For instance: irregular verb conjugations.

0: I tried SRS and failed to keep up a bunch of times... and I want to give it a sec^H^Hthird chance at some point!

1: [https://www.supermemo.com/en/articles/20rules](https://www.supermemo.com/en/articles/20rules)

<comment><USER17> I see SRS as simply automation of the natural need of the memory: facts have to be repeated to be remembered. It's not like one can just dismiss that neuronal connections get stronger on repetition.

Then, a computerized approach allows for fine control of many variables in the scheduling of individual cards.

Some people use mnemonics to boost memorization, essentially supplying context and associations where there's none—hijacking another natural tendency of memory. But you can't invent many mnemonics e.g. for geographic facts, and rote memorization is the primary approach there. (And IMO mnemonics are fragile and unreliable due to their nature of being invented out of thin air.)

</comment></comment><comment><USER36> I found Anki the only software that can easily make flash cards using LaTeX. I typically have a lot of equations and I prefer to write my cards using the outlines package in LaTeX. It makes it very easy to write bulleted lists. [https://www.ctan.org/tex- archive/macros/latex/contrib/outlin...](https://www.ctan.org/tex- archive/macros/latex/contrib/outlines)

In the latest version of Anki, the LaTeX is rendered using SVG and looks great on Retina and HiDPI screens without having large file sizes.

I know others who maintain their cards/latex in a text file and import the changes rather than working in the Anki software for creating and maintaining cards.

</comment><comment><USER37> About a week ago I developed a browser plugin for chrome and firefox which replaces the new tab page with anki flashcards to review. The idea is that with it, each time I open a new tab I will review a few cards, thus making it more lightweight than an hour-long anki session. If anyone is interested the code (licensed under The Unlicense) and links to the web stores can be found at [https://github.com/corollari/ankiTab](https://github.com/corollari/ankiTab) Note: In order for it to work you need to be logged in ankiweb.net

<comment><USER7> wow this is a great tool, I have been searching for something like this.

If only there was a way to quickly add cards that would be nice.

</comment></comment><comment><USER38> I started using Anki a few weeks ago when the SuperMemo article popped up on HN. I really like it, and it has helped me remember key terms and learn a new language, all in a really short time...

Feel free to ask me questions if you're confused about how it works! I'm fairly experienced now.

<comment><USER39> I want to learn Spanish. I have a basic vocabulary and understanding. What's the fastest way forward in your opinion?

<comment><USER40> "Fluent Forever" has a suggestion of putting a picture (from, say, google image search) on the front of the card, and the foreign word as the answer. That way you test yourself by producing the correct word without translating it from language 1 to language 2.

Example for Spanish:

Front: picture of a "gatito" from google image search. Back: gatito

The word "kitten" is not used at all. No translations!

The reason you search images in the foreign language is that sometimes the foreign word has a different connotation, and isn't a direct translation. (The example he used was for "girl" in Russian. девушка supposedly means "girl" and yet when you search it, it's (mostly) seemingly a certain type, not "girl" in general.)

<comment><USER41> That only works for simple words. For example when I google for "Zufriedenheit" (satisfaction), I get a picture of a red boat.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER42> Spaced learning really works. I've started to slowly convert python, sql, and postgres docs to flash cards in Anki.

Anki's implementation has some rough edges, but for $0/mon for multi-device use, it's an amazing way to get your feet wet with this learning technique.

<comment><USER43> The iphone app costs like $25 tho.

<comment><USER44> There's now a free app that seems to do the same thing.

<comment><USER43> Afaik this one cannot connect to Ankiweb, therefore you can't sync your status with other devices.

<comment><USER44> It does seem to offer sync, too. Not sure how well the sync works, but the app says it will sync.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER45> Derek Sivers (CD Baby guy) had written an article about how to memorize a programming language using SRS and Anki:

[https://sivers.org/srs](https://sivers.org/srs)

</comment><comment><USER46> This looks like a derivative/expansion of the Leitner Method[0] which I first came across over on Reddit in /r/flying for flashcard-based studying. I have definitely always had more success with paper-based studying than studying electronically--I recommend that you take a look at that document if you fall into this category as well!

[0] [https://drive.google.com/file/d/0BzlHy07nfEjOQ2hXWjU3LWpDdmc...](https://drive.google.com/file/d/0BzlHy07nfEjOQ2hXWjU3LWpDdmc/view)

<comment><USER17> I'd say one of the main benefits with Anki or SuperMemo is that the automation of the algorithm allows for many more variables than you could track manually. For each card, the history of its reviews can be remembered and taken into account―e.g. both Anki and SM have several possible answers for how well you remember the card instead of just "yes/no," varying the next interval relative to the previous one. You can tune parameters for each set of cards, allocating more or less attention to them depending on how easily you remember different kinds of information. This control, IMO, optimizes the schedule over the course of months. (Though it does make tweaking the params rather complicated sometimes.)

</comment></comment><comment><USER47> I've used anki for learning German a few years ago and it really worked for me - I was able to learn a few (<500) hundred new words in about 2 months. Not bad at all for a person with no language talent. Although, I've stopped learning the language 3 years ago, I still understand German texts, thanks to anki.

When using anki, a browser extension, enabling creation of flashcards, from the content found on the Internet, is handy. I find a website fluentcards.com and its browser extension, quite OK. Unluckily, it seems not to be maintained and there is no official add-on for Firefox, but you can build it from the github repo [1] and it will work on FF, too. The webpage also allows export of the words saved on Kindle to the anki.

There are also a few extensions for learning Japanese specifically. [2] seems to be the most popular.

[1] [https://github.com/katspaugh/fluentcards- extension](https://github.com/katspaugh/fluentcards-extension)

[2] [https://foosoft.net/projects/yomichan/](https://foosoft.net/projects/yomichan/)

</comment><comment><USER48> I started Anki about two weeks ago and I've already reviewed over 1,200 cards. It's a fun way to start the day and is surprisingly therapeutic. It really makes remembering a choice.

</comment><comment><USER49> Related and useful website I've found - [https://codecode.ninja/](https://codecode.ninja/), spaced learning for devs

</comment><comment><USER50> Not to be an ass, but is there some new feature of Anki I'm missing? Or is this kind of like posting "Google: A Search Engine Worth Checking Out"?

<comment><USER51> I would absolutely read "Google: A Search Engine Worth Checking Out". For the past few years, one can be longer do verbatim searches with operators, and every short search is filled with movie and pop music results even though I consume neither.

If there is anything worth checking it about Google's search engine today, I would want to know.

Rant off: I'm sure that those in the HN crowd who don't yet know what Anki is, would like to. It is the whole secret to my career success.

</comment></comment><comment><USER52> I got through all my medical anaesthesiology board exams with anki,although i do prefer flashcards where the order is the same rather than anki style algo.

</comment><comment><USER53> I'm a big fan of spaced repetition, made a lightweight browser extension to carry around with me when I'm surfing the web [https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/harvest-take- notes...](https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/harvest-take-notes-and- le/dejecgndbecimagkaefkfdaedaimamji)

</comment><comment><USER54> If anyone is familiar with memrise, is it simmilar?

<comment><USER18> It does, but many of the decks on memrise are horribly made, so I stopped using it. Clozemaster is much better in my opinion.

</comment></comment><comment><USER55> I'm using anki to gradually learn japanese kanji using the RTK method. Working really well so far, up to about 800 with little struggle.

<comment><USER56> Take my advice, as a somewhat advanced learner: don't do this. RTK is this weird honeypot for beginning learners, but it's nearly always a mistake. The "discouraged RTK user" is almost a comic meme in Japanese language study.

You will spend months "learning kanji", only to discover that knowing kanji meanings, in isolation, is unhelpful in most situations. You can get all of the same benefits, with more immediate utility, by just learning words.

<comment><USER55> Thanks. So, I'm actually doing it as a side thing while learning German. I have found I can't do two languages at once, but that learning the characters doesn't interfere.

I should finish them by April or so, and be advanced enough in German at that point that I can switch to Japanese. At which point I'll do Pimsleur and Assimil.

I think having the character base will accelerate that process. I previously tried Pimsleur Japanese, but found it didn't go smoothly compared to European languages I've done. The lack of characters was a big hurdle.

Thanks though. Is discouraged RTK learner someone who completed RTK, or someone who fails to

<comment><USER56> Someone who fails. The usual pattern is: new learner goes all-in on RtK, makes it a month or two, then gives up after realizing that they're making no discernible progress, even though they "know" lots of kanji.

There are useful parts of RtK, but they're the parts Heisig didn't invent: radicals and mnemonics. You can (and should) employ both, but in the context of words. As you learn words, the "meanings" of kanji will naturally settle in your brain.

RtK people love to argue that it helps them infer the meanings of words and discriminate similar kanji. But in practice, it's insanely difficult to do the former (except for simple words), and the latter is rarely necessary. It's far more common to encounter 2-3 kanji compounds with unique meanings that recombine into words, than it is to find words that compose meanings from their individual kanji.

<comment><USER55> Yeah, I could see that happening. I'm not expecting it to be a panacea, just a mild accelerant I can actually do while waiting to finish with German.

What do you think of that plan? My assumption is that I'll better be able to learn the words in the Pimsleur course the second time around when I can see the writing, and that this will make the overall process easier. It felt like too much, cognitively, the last time.

And at my current pace, the Kanji are about 30 min per day, so it mostly feels fun. If I were doing more I don't think it would be worthwhile, it would be stressful.

<comment><USER56> To be honest, I think you'd be better off just studying words. Studying kanji really doesn't help you.

<comment><USER55> Right, but zero? I can't study Japanese words at the moment without interfering with German.

<comment><USER57> If you're doing it mostly for fun with a side benefit of recognizing a few characters here and there, go for it. Just know you're choosing to learn in a way that's not really recommended for most.

If your learning goals are mostly focused around reading, it's helpful a bit.

If you want to actually understand and use the language, hiragana, katakana, vocab and grammar have much higher utility.

<comment><USER56> This is correct.

My most complete advice would be to focus exclusively on the language you're learning and don't futz around with half-measures, but who am I to tell you what to study? If you've gotta satisfy the itch, then sure, you might learn something.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER58> It has been a while since I used Anki and I vaguely recall I have a horrible experience with creating cards.

I really wish there is a way I can create cards in vim or something, but that sounds really limited when it comes to things like Chinese where you need to somehow write out the character or find an image of it on the Internet.

<comment><USER59> Honest question, what is so hard about writing Chinese to create carss? I find at least typing in pinyin on windows and android isn't so bad, or did you mean specifically in the context of vim?

<comment><USER58> specifically with vim.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER60> I always kinda wondered how to make Anki stuff for like algorithms and the like.

<comment><USER18> For Anki, I'd grab the complete article from Wikipedia/textbook/[good source], and then write a few examples. The flashcards would be a number of cloze deletions, and then I'd have a separate deck with a practice question to recall from a blank state. For example [1], I'd take this Wikipedia article, and break it down like so:

In computer science, a stack is an abstract data type that serves as a collection of elements, with two principal operations: pop and push.

This sentence would become a number of flashcards that look like ([...] is a cloze deletion where you have to insert the missing word, each cloze is a flashcard):

In computer science, a [...] is an abstract data type that serves as a collection of elements, with two principal operations: pop and push.

In computer science, a stack is an abstract data type that serves as a [...] of elements, with two principal operations: pop and push.

In computer science, a stack is an abstract data type that serves as a collection of [...], with two principal operations: pop and push.

In computer science, a stack is an abstract data type that serves as a collection of elements, with [...] principal operations: pop and push.

In computer science, a stack is an abstract data type that serves as a collection of elements, with two principal operations: [...] and push.

In computer science, a stack is an abstract data type that serves as a collection of elements, with two principal operations: pop and [...].

You'd do that for most of the article. Find a few examples of a stack, do the same thing from cloze deletions, and then in a separate card, make a few questions to have you write from scratch, parts of a stack.

The separate deck would be so your regular reviews don't take forever, when you get a question asking you to write out a stack. The other deck would be done say 3-4 days a week, and have many fewer cards, because they're going to take awhile to answer. You could even use the index card method for this part as it's closer to actual practice than recall.

In another deck, I'd also have short answer questions. For example, what's the difference between a stack and a queue, or stack and array, etc. This would also be more for practice sessions, rather than daily repetitions, as the questions could take awhile to answer.

Note that you'll have a ton of flashcards this way for each algo, but they'll be extremely easy to answer (a good thing). Five flashcards you can answer in 2-10 seconds each, is much better than one flashcard that takes you a minute to answer.

Assuming five seconds to answer a flashcard, you could easily do 120 repetitions through the day. The nice thing about Anki is the mobile clients, so you can do a few cards while you have some downtime. When I was in school, I was usually doing flashcards while I was waiting for class to start or going to the bathroom etc.

<comment><USER61> That seems like a waste of flashcards to me, but if it works for you, it works. I would just create one flashcard for front and back. What is a stack in CS? A stack is an abstract data type that's a collection of elements, with two principal operations: pop and push. If an answer's longer than 1-2 sentences then it's time to break it apart into different questions.

<comment><USER18> I find it somewhat excessive (and I still make poor cards even my by own guidelines all the time), but I try optimize to make my flashcards as easy as possible to answer according to [1].

Especially in the long run once you get thousands of flashcards, and have a few breaks because of life. A general rule of thumb I go by is that my answer should be shorter than the question.

Even in your answer there's three or four separate parts to it. You have:

1\. An abstract data type 2\. collection of elements 3\. Two principal operations 3a. Pop and push

[1] [https://www.supermemo.com/en/articles/20rules](https://www.supermemo.com/en/articles/20rules)

<comment><USER61> Fair enough. I guess I'm pointing out with cloze questions that don't hide all the selected text, you're perhaps making it too easy. I prefer hiding all, showing one. On a test, you might be able to get similar hints but if the understanding isn't there you might be thrown off by different wording. If I'm creating the knowledge for work, I'd rather simplify as much as possible, break up into different parts where necessary, and learn the answer exactly. Relying on additional context is not something I'd do. For those reasons, I'd prefer regular flashcards when possible. The other benefit of a single flashcard is it's easier for organization purposes.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER62> I really like the [https://ankimono.com](https://ankimono.com) webapp, although creating your own clone is a great way to learn a new framework or language.

<comment><USER31> That's a clozed-source knockoff of Anki. With SRS it's important that you choose a solution that will still be working in 5, 10, or even 20 years. Anki being open-source and sporting an open format fits that bill. Also, it has a proper desktop app, so you never need to worry about losing access to your data ahead of an important exam, etc.

</comment></comment><comment><USER63> Does anyone here have suggestions or similar experience with strategies to maintain physical practices like sports, martial arts or playing musical instruments?

</comment><comment><USER60> Always wanted to try this, never was sure how to use it for algorithms and the like though.

</comment><comment><USER64> While I do like the project, the webui is horrible :/.

<comment><USER61> It's a lot better for the desktop app and the add-ons make it more powerful.

</comment></comment><comment><USER65> $39AUD for the mobile app with no free / demo version is more than a little steep IMO.

<comment><USER66> The desktop version is free and open source. You'll want to start with the desktop version anyway, because it's easier to make your cards on a computer than a phone.

After a while you'll know if it's for you or not. Then you can buy the iOS version.

The Android version is made by a different set of people, and it's completely free as well. It's called AnkiDroid.</comment></comment>


A Mother's Ninth-Century Manual on How to Be a Man - <AUTHOR> https://www.theparisreview.org/blog/2017/12/01/mothers-ninth-century-manual-man/ <comment><USER2> Thought there will be a link to the actual book or something, so we could compare their approach with the modern view.

<comment><USER3> English translation: [https://www.amazon.com/Handbook-William-Carolingian- Medieval...](https://www.amazon.com/Handbook-William-Carolingian-Medieval- Translation/dp/0813209382/ref=pd_sbs_14_1)

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Does anyone know where to get the original text? My search only yielded a badly mangled and unreadable paper scan.</comment>


New York's hipsters too cool for the census - <AUTHOR> http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=125811666

<comment><USER2> Q: How many hipsters does it take to fill out the census?

A: It's kind of an obscure number. You probably haven't heard of it.

<comment><USER3> Or A: You mean you don't _know_?

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> "Mr. STARK: I guess it's laziness and like, what's the point? When it comes down to it, nobody wants to fill out like another form that's just like getting sent to your house that really relatively has nothing to do with your life."

I mean, like, it provides essential statistics for the configuration of congressional districts, and umm like it's mandated by the constitution and stuff and junk, but like... what's the point?

<comment><USER5> He uses this idiotic and clumsy like-speak. Like, what do you expect? :)

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> Not sure what the point of a census is? At least in Germany, I think you are required by law to tell the state when ad where you have moved. So the state should have all the information already on file. Nevertheless, the German government has at times tried to make a census. But improved technology might alleviate the need?

Probably there are people who don't bother to announce their moves and births - but why would they bother to fill in a census form instead?

Maybe an easier way would be to make announcing a move a lot easier, like sending a tweet to the government.

Or create an iPhone app for the census form, that automatically determines your location, sex and age from your usage patterns.

Even simpler: create a law that requires Google to disclose that information.

<comment><USER7> There is no such requirement in the US.

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> And according to the story the return rate from the Hasidics in Williamsburg is only 25%.

</comment><comment><USER9> Hipsters won't fill out the census because everyone else does and it's not underground.

</comment><comment><USER10> When in Williamsburg the other month, I saw lots of folks I took to be Hasidic, but nobody who looked any hipper than my middle-aged un-hip self. Of course, it was between 11 and noon, so perhaps the truly hip had not rolled out of the sack yet.

But it surprises me that the Satmars wouldn't have the whole congressional thing in mind.

</comment><comment><USER11> Hell I wouldn't do it either, but the Danish government already has all of that info on file.

</comment><comment><USER12> People should only note how many people live in the dwelling and send it back. That's the only constitutionally approved question the census is supposed to ask.

The rest of the questions are there to tell politicians what group they should pander to and how to reconfigure congressional zones.

The census TV ads about filling in your race (actually your country of ancestry) are really pissing me off too. It wasn't that long ago census data was used to roundup Japanese citizens during WWII...they claimed it was private back then too.

<comment><USER13> The Constitution (Article 1 Section 2) specifically gives the House of Representatives power to decide the questions present in the census: "[I]n such Manner as [the House] shall by Law direct."

Here are the questions asked in the first census, conducted in 1790:

* Name of the head of each household.

* How many free white males age 16 and older.

* How many free white males under age 16.

* How many free white females.

* How many of all other free persons.

* How many slaves.

I don't suppose you're a fan of Michelle Bachmann's, are you? Here's a recent response a FOX News(!) anchor gave Bachmann regarding this:

"We've had a lot of good years since then," Kelly said. "That was a different time and a different era. We've had decades since then when, at least to our knowledge, this information hasn't been abused. So how do you respond to people who say, 'Look, we've been doing it for decades since then. The law is what it is and you as a lawmaker should know better than to break it.'"

[http://minnesotaindependent.com/37810/bachmann-links- census-...](http://minnesotaindependent.com/37810/bachmann-links-census-to- japanese-internment)

<comment><USER14> If we don't know how many [ _Japanese_ ] we have, how do we know how many [ _prison camps_ ] to build?

We can't move forward until you mail it back.</comment></comment></comment>


Kids Who Don't Sleep Enough Are at Greater Risk for Depression, Anxiety Later - <AUTHOR> http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052748704029704576087943126802036.html <comment><USER2> This article reminds me of my own childhood. I was badly abused and could not fall asleep. I would lay in bed staring at the ceiling each night, worrying. Sometimes morning would come, time for school, and I would still be awake. When I could sleep, I would often wake up screaming in terror in the middle of the night. After this, it was often hard to fall asleep.

I told teachers, friends, relatives. Some would meet with the parent that abused me. They would come out convinced that he was a model citizen.

I told our family doctor about what was going on. He prescribed pills. Later I found these were antidepressants. They made me not care so much about being abused. So they "worked". But it wasn't really a solution, and I still lay awake at night.

Since then, reading about the field of psychiatry, I have found I was not alone. It is extremely common for people whose lives are horrific to be told that the problem is not the abuse or torture they report, but a "chemical imbalance" and the solution is pills.

Because of this I do not trust the medical industry, or these studies, for good reason. I am also deeply skeptical of those who do.

<comment><USER3> I think you'd be better off distrusting those accused of abuse by their children, than distrusting medical professionals. It's hard to imagine the doctor meant you any ill will.

<comment><USER2> It's hard to imagine that a doctor meant ill will by deciding the best way to deal with ongoing abuse is to medicate away the pain that it causes?

I don't find it hard to imagine there is ill will there. But even if there wasn't ill will, even if the support of abuse was done because doctors genuinely believe that abuse is good for people and it is sufficient to medicate away the pain superficially, why should that engender trust of their profession?

 _edit:_ shouldn't have gotten off topic with this. My main insight is that, yes some kids don't get enough sleep watching TV or playing video games. These are not insomniacs, they are just doing other things and then not getting enough sleep. There are also those of us that couldn't fall asleep because of the stress. That is totally different. And it is this latter group, not the video and TV group, which I assert is the one more prone to suicide, for reasons that are clear and follow from a known mechanism.

The "study" is instead interpreting the data that lack of sleep causes the problems. I look at the exact same data and interpret it that a subset of those are not sleeping because of problems in the family that are the same problems that lead to the suicides. NOT the lack of sleep. If that was true, there would be evidence across the board that less sleep leads to suicide. But that's not the case. The conclusions from the data are wrong here. The data is fine, I believe the data.

This gets to a larger issue of the way studies are done. Data is hidden from the public, and the wild assed interpretations are published as a "scientific fact". But in many cases the same facts could lead to an opposite conclusion or no conclusion at all. Just because facts are not in dispute (and that's not always the case) does not mean that the claimed conclusions follow from the data. It's seldom the case that they do in peer reviewed studies, which is a big part of the Ionaddis effect.

<comment><USER3> I'm confused, the post I was replying to discussed doctors who did not believe the child was being abused. Are you saying you are 100% certain the doctors KNEW you were being abused, and decided it wasn't important?

As for treating the symptoms and not the cause, how can doctors treat teh cause if they can't pin down what it is? Would you prefer they just refused to treat the symptoms before finding the cause? That's the only other option.

<comment><USER4> Then you did not read the post you were replying to

 _I told our family doctor about what was going on. He prescribed pills._

<comment><USER2> Yes. He wasn't the only one I reached out to either, there was also a long stream of therapists after that. I begged my parents to get us into therapy. We did and the therapy focused on why is insomniac so mentally ill. Insomniac (me) wasn't ill at all though. That's the point. Sometimes depression is the result of unrealistic expectations. For these the solution is CBT. But in other cases depression and suicide are symptoms of things being seriously fucked up. They are not "Mental illnesses". There is no chemical imbalance. The myth of mental illness as an explanation for why abused people are unhappy has caused a lot of suffering. I am not saying that some people are not insane. I am saying that when 50% of the people are depressed in a psychotic, inconsistent, abusive, warmongering society where abuse and torture are virtues, it's not because of a brain imbalance. It wasn't until I was an adult that I saw what was going on. Now I see pretty clearly and am no longer depressed. But I am angry, and that anger is justified. This was long ago and all the people involved are now dead, of natural causes. Getting the news they had died was the only thing that ever brought me peace.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> > A 2010 study of 392 boys and girls published online in the Journal of > Psychiatric Research found that those who had trouble sleeping at 12 to 14 > years old were more than two times as likely to have suicidal thoughts at > ages 15 to 17 as those who didn't have sleep problems at the younger age.

Correlation is not causation. Children with crappy abusive lives stay awake at night wondering why their lives are so crappy, and they are more likely to kill themselves. Both from the some underlying cause.

Now that I have debunked this flawed survey, to be consistent with the new Andrew Wakefield doctrine, we the internet must call for the retraction of the study and the lynching of the authors.

<comment><USER6> There are statistical ways to ensure that the results obtained from a study are both a) not due to chance and b) statistically significant to be applicable to larger sample sizes. Hopefully, both were applied and evaluated during the peer review process when a study gets published. I could potentially extract the actual data from the studies but alas, traditional media consider it a sin to link to the original papers and of course, a simple 'recent studies' is sufficient for us common people.

Edit: spelling, clarity

<comment><USER7> You need to perform an intervention to test for correlation vs. causation, and that would involve getting lots of normal children, and traumatising half of them. Those studies are considered a bit retro in the scientific community, for some reason.

<comment><USER8> Judea Pearl disagrees.

<comment><USER9> Links about Judea Pearl:

<http://www.danielpearl.org/about_us/Judea_Pearl.html>

<http://ftp.cs.ucla.edu/pub/stat_ser/R320.pdf>

The usual link to Peter Norvig (director of research at Google) on experimental research, which is good food for thought:

<http://norvig.com/experiment-design.html>

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> Stories like this are correlated with people muttering about "correlation is not causation". It's a cause for concern.

<comment><USER11> Difference between correlation and causation is if its correlation then putting these kids to sleep by say a drug in order to fix their sleeping patterns won't do squat in fixing their core problem which may be the actual cause of both the sleeping problems and future mental issues apologies for the run on sentence.

<comment><USER12> _apologies for the run on sentence._

You know, I don't think it was a run-on sentence until you added that last part :).

<comment><USER13> I can't remember what author it was, but I'm sure it was Charles Dickens (but it's too early in the morning for me to be sure of anything), that made an entire page a single sentence to mock people who had complained about his long 'run-on' sentences. IIRC the page-long sentence wasn't a run-on sentence.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> This is referring to children who have trouble sleeping, as opposed to children who choose not to sleep much.

</comment><comment><USER15> The answer to that question is always from when you fall asleep to when you get up. If you need to use an alarm you need to go to bed earlier. If you can't sleep you need to destress your life.

Yes there are real exceptions to that but in regards to a longitudinal study that's the answer

<comment><USER16> Well, actually, the idea behind doing science, like the studies cited in the article, is to find actual evidence for things rather than just guessing what the answer is.</comment></comment>


Real scalability is hard, aka there are no silver bullets - <AUTHOR> http://scalability.org/2016/06/real-scalability-is-hard-aka-there-are-no-silver-bullets/ <comment><AUTHOR> HN discussion that inspired this post - [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11855594](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11855594)</comment>


Oracle Launches Open Office 3.3 and Cloud Office - <AUTHOR> http://www.zdnet.co.uk/news/mobile-apps/2010/12/16/oracle-takes-office-suite-to-the-cloud-40091192/

<comment><USER2> "Users wanting to access Cloud Office from a web browser will need to be running Firefox 3.6 or Internet Explorer 8. It will also be supported by the Apple iOS and Google Android mobile platforms for mobile access."

Interesting that they mention WebKit support on mobile platforms but not the desktop -- I hope there isn't a browser-lock against Safari and/or Chrome on the desktop as well.

(I fully know this is likely me over-thinking it, but it seemed a (somewhat) notable omission.)

</comment><comment><USER3> Is Libreoffice coming up with their cloud solution anytime soon?</comment>


McCarthy 2.0? - <AUTHOR> http://techcrunch.com/2015/12/16/a-call-to-arms-against-mccarthy-2-0/ <comment><USER2> No Bill of Attainder or ex post facto Law shall be passed. (Article 1, section 9 of the US Constitution)

This smells very like a bill of attainder, though with the current SCOTUS, it may not be considered to be one.

</comment><comment><USER3> What is with Tech Crunch and their political articles making to hacker news?</comment>


Mutt fork with Lua scripting, tagging and unified inbox - <AUTHOR> https://www.neomutt.org/changes/user <comment><USER2> This came up in the recent thread about switching to mutt :

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14567074](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14567074)

That was also where I did shameful self-promotion of my own console-based mail client with lua scripting:

[https://github.com/lumail/lumail](https://github.com/lumail/lumail)</comment>


Human-level control through deep reinforcement learning - <AUTHOR> http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/v518/n7540/full/nature14236.html <comment><USER2> The code is online if you want to play with it. [https://sites.google.com/a/deepmind.com/dqn/](https://sites.google.com/a/deepmind.com/dqn/)

If you're interested, one of the main authors (David Silver) teaches a very good and intuitive introductory class on reinforcement learning at UCL: [http://www0.cs.ucl.ac.uk/staff/d.silver/web/Teaching.html](http://www0.cs.ucl.ac.uk/staff/d.silver/web/Teaching.html)

<comment><USER3> Interesting that they're using Torch7. The code is pretty concise and readable, very cool stuff.

<comment><USER4> They wrote Torch7...

<comment><USER3> I'm sure a number of people who have contributed to Torch are working at DeepMind. However, Torch has been around for much longer than DeepMind (about 12 years at this point). Two of the major contributors to Torch, Ronan Collobert and Clement Farabet, were never DeepMind employees.

To be fair, another major contributor to Torch is a co-author of this paper (Kavukcuoglu).

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> > _...the authors used the same algorithm, network architecture, and > hyperparameters on each game..._

This is huge. It shows that the algorithm was able to generalize across multiple problem sets within the same domain of "playing Atari 2600 games", and not simply a "lucky" choice of algorithm, network architecture, or hyperparameters that a random search for each game might choose. This is also not a violation of the No Free Lunch (NFL) Theorem [1], because the domain is limited to playing Atari 2600 games, which share many characteristics.

[1]: [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/No_free_lunch_in_search_and_op...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/No_free_lunch_in_search_and_optimization)

<comment><USER6> > the algorithm was able to generalize across multiple problem sets

Did it really? I think they reset it and retrained it for each game.

I'd like to know how much more is needed to make one instance of the AI that can successfully play any of the games. To play all 49 games that it could learn, does it need to be an extra level deep? Or 49 times larger? Or 2^49 times more?

<comment><USER7> Can one human successfully play all of the games without prior practice in each game? As far as I know a human has to practice almost every game to be able to play all of them without losses. I think for an AI, achieving this standard is a good result - first practicing in each game and then play through all of them without losses.

<comment><USER6> A person that learns 1 game will learn the next game much faster, because they have learned a concept such as a bullet or switch or reflection or wrapping. We take this for granted, but there was a time when Breakout was actually marginally fun because it was new.

A person that's played all the other games in the list can win Montezuma's Revenge on the first try; this AI can't play Montezuma's Revenge at all.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> Watch it play:

[http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/v518/n7540/extref/natur...](http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/v518/n7540/extref/nature14236-sv1.mov)

[http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/v518/n7540/extref/natur...](http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/v518/n7540/extref/nature14236-sv2.mov)

<comment><USER9> This is so cool. I'd love to work on this stuff...

Anyone know how hard it would be for someone who is fairly good at programming (works as a full stack developer and feels quite comfortable learning new things) and has strong math skills (undergrad degree) to break into this field? Is going back to school for a masters/phd the best way?

<comment><USER10> How about you read the article and get a few books on the relevant topics? It would probably be much cheaper than going back to school.

<comment><USER9> Very good point. I taught myself web dev (now working at a pretty awesome startup) so I'm definitely familiar with that route.

I have a few cool AI ideas I'm hoping to start spending more time in the coming months, and I have heard of some great online courses to check out. I was just curious as to how important institutional credentials are for this kind of thing, seeing as it much more academic than building CRUD web apps.

<comment><USER7> I think there are lots of AI competitions where you can join and make your name.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> Here's a publicly-accessible link to the full paper:

[http://rdcu.be/cdlg](http://rdcu.be/cdlg)

<comment><USER12> Only the first page, the rest is blurred and has to be paid for.

<comment><USER13> Let it load...

<comment><USER12> They are using tricks. When I tried the first time the pdf was blurred and the page automatically opened the payment menu. On the second try it showed the entire pdf, disallowing download.

<comment><USER14> It loaded completely for me the first time, but doesn't allow download.

A step toward open access, but they're still trying to claim copyright and control the work of others.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> It is interesting how they are using various biological models to develop their own model. They gave their model a reward system and a memory. It will be interesting to see how far deep Q-networks can be extended and at what point they hit the wall of diminishing returns.

|Nevertheless, games demanding more temporally extended planning strategies still constitute a major challenge for all existing agents including DQN.

|Notably, the succesfsful integration of reinforcement learning with deep network architectures was critically dependent on our incorporation of a replay algorithm involving the storage and representations of recently experienced transitions.

I am not for sure what data the replay algorithm has access to, but I wonder what happens if you extend the amount of data it has. This might be the brick wall this algorithm hits of diminishing returns.

It would be interesting to hear what the authors think could help help improve how their model deals with temporally extended planning strategies.

As someone who grew up on Atari, Nintendo and Sony this is pretty cool work.

<comment><USER16> I expect it could go far. Mind you I only did parts of _Artificial Intellegence: A modern approach_ but the Q-learning algorthim seems very flexible. [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Q-learning](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Q-learning) It basically keeps doing good stuff, while exploring to get out of local minimas.

</comment></comment><comment><USER17> An interesting critic by Schmidhuber about this publication:

[https://plus.google.com/100849856540000067209/posts/eLQf4KC9...](https://plus.google.com/100849856540000067209/posts/eLQf4KC97Bs)

<comment><USER18> Seems to be critiquing the claim that this is "groundbreaking" and not much else. Nice to get some further context though. :)

</comment></comment><comment><USER19> Is this a different paper to the original DeepMind video game paper? [http://arxiv.org/abs/1312.5602](http://arxiv.org/abs/1312.5602)

<comment><USER20> Yes, I can't access the full paper but at least the figures are different :)

Edit: Ars Technica has a summary of this new paper. [https://arstechnica.com/science/2015/02/ai- masters-49-atari-...](https://arstechnica.com/science/2015/02/ai- masters-49-atari-2600-games-without-instructions/)

</comment></comment><comment><USER21> Is there a chance this paper will be available as PDF? I' finding it difficult to read the readcube version. :-(

<comment><USER22> [http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/v518/n7540/pdf/nature14...](http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/v518/n7540/pdf/nature14236.pdf)

<comment><USER23> Maybe you have institutional access or something, but for the rest of us, that link just redirects to the abstract.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER24> I think qlearning is really interesting, I posted yesterday a simple implementation/demo in Javascript of qlearning. This paper goes way beyond qlearning by deducing states based on a deep neural network from the actual game rendering, really cool. Regardless, as a first intro to qlearning I had fun putting this together [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9105818](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9105818)

</comment><comment><USER24> Here is the marketing side of this publication in which Google scientists (aquihired from Deepmind) have developed a way to outperform humans in Atari games: [http://m.phys.org/news/2015-02-hal-bests-humans-space- invade...](http://m.phys.org/news/2015-02-hal-bests-humans-space- invaders.html)

</comment><comment><USER25> Is the paper available anywhere to read without having to pay Nature? From the comments it seems as if everyone is able to read this but me! Even in their "readcube" access method, only the first page is (barely) visible, the rest seems blurred.

</comment><comment><USER19> The most interesting thing about this is that it shows significant progress towards goal-oriented AI. The fact this system is effectively learning what "win" means in the context of a game is something of a breakthrough.

<comment><USER26> I do not think that it figures out "what the win is" as the score parameter is explicitly made available to the algorithm.

In some sense this paper even demonstrates that how simple the problem actually is.

I think more important question is that what else can be modelled as such problem.

</comment></comment><comment><USER27> It is an amazingly powerful technique. We've been working on a service which lets you do this kind of learning with any JSON stream. You can see a demo here:

[https://aiseedo.com/demos/cookiemonster/](https://aiseedo.com/demos/cookiemonster/)

<comment><USER28> The amazing part of what DeepMind has achieved is its capability to learn from raw pixel input with deep convolutional neural networks, which as I understand it quite different from what you do.

Still the reinforcement learning part is the same, but reinforcement learning was not the main contribution of this nature paper.

<comment><USER27> Its not all that different, we take multiple asynchronous streams of messages integrate them into a coherent predictive model, and use that to feed the reinforcement learning. The messages can contain images, a simple case can be seen in the demo with a 1d vision sensor.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER29> Can someone convert "academia nerd language" down one notch into "regular nerd language". On the surface, this sounds interesting but despite being a huge nerd I'm not really sure what the hell they're talking about.

<comment><USER30> Here is a very rough translation from my POV:

> The theory of reinforcement learning provides a normative account, deeply > rooted in psychological and neuroscientific perspectives on animal > behaviour, of how agents may optimize their control of an environment.

Reinforcement (rewards/punishments) is a highly effective way to train autonomous individuals to succeed in arbitrary environments.

> To use reinforcement learning successfully in situations approaching real- > world complexity, however, agents are confronted with a difficult task: they > must derive efficient representations of the environment from high- > dimensional sensory inputs, and use these to generalize past experience to > new situations.

This kind of open-ended learning in a simulation is hard: Think of the number of inputs from all your senses being continually processed by the nervous system at a given time. Being able to take all those inputs, each of which changes meaning depending on context, to figure out what to do right now (while learning from the past in the process) is a hard problem, especially for a computer to solve.

> Remarkably, humans and other animals seem to solve this problem through a > harmonious combination of reinforcement learning and hierarchical sensory > processing systems, the former evidenced by a wealth of neural data > revealing notable parallels between the phasic signals emitted by > dopaminergic neurons and temporal difference reinforcement learning > algorithms.

Humans and other animals have this figured out through our own brains ("dopaminergic neurons") and the combination of our senses and various parts of our nervous systems/biology (e.g. our reflexes respond faster than our cognition due to the hierarchy of autonomic nervous system response).

> While reinforcement learning agents have achieved some successes in a > variety of domains, their applicability has previously been limited to > domains in which useful features can be handcrafted, or to domains with > fully observed, low-dimensional state spaces.

Past reinforcement-based algorithms have worked well, but require thorough understanding of the problem being solved, or for the problem to be relatively simple and predictable.

> Here we use recent advances in training deep neural networks to develop a > novel artificial agent, termed a deep Q-network, that can learn successful > policies directly from high-dimensional sensory inputs using end-to-end > reinforcement learning.

By combining advances in deep neural network training with reinforcement learning in a "novel artificial agent" ("a deep Q-network"), our agent can learn sophisticated problems through only reinforcement learning.

> We tested this agent on the challenging domain of classic Atari 2600 games. > We demonstrate that the deep Q-network agent, receiving only the pixels and > the game score as inputs, was able to surpass the performance of all > previous algorithms and achieve a level comparable to that of a professional > human games tester across a set of 49 games, using the same algorithm, > network architecture and hyperparameters.

Our new approach works across 49 games using the same approach for each game (where each game presumably has different rules and dynamics), and is able to perform at the same level as a professional human being.

> This work bridges the divide between high-dimensional sensory inputs and > actions, resulting in the first artificial agent that is capable of learning > to excel at a diverse array of challenging tasks.

We've created a universal learning algorithm that can take a multitude of inputs and consistently respond correctly without having to re-define the model for each game or problem.

<comment><USER15> |> This work bridges the divide between high-dimensional sensory inputs and actions, resulting in the first artificial agent that is capable of learning to excel at a diverse array of challenging tasks.

|We've created a universal learning algorithm that can take a multitude of inputs and consistently respond correctly without having to re-define the model for each game or problem.

Further along in the article, it turns out it is actually a subset of games which don't involve long term planning strategies.

<comment><USER31> > Further along in the article, it turns out it is actually a subset of games > which don't involve long term planning strategies.

Unfortunately I can't access the paper, and the ReadCube link seems to require Flash, but I'm assuming a "Q-network" is based on Q-learning. Q-learning is essentially a lookup table of states to actions, where we guess what state we're in from our observations and look up which action to perform that will get us the most reward.

In that sense, it's clear that a Q-learning approach would struggle with long- term planning, since its memory only goes as far as 1 action. Of course there are ways to extend Q-learning, but these tend to destroy it's best feature: implementation efficiency.

One nice alternative I've seen in recent years is Gradient Temporal Difference, which allows linear functions to be learned rather than just single actions, and retains lots of the performance properties of Q-learning (O(n) in the number of functions learned, off-policy learning, etc.).

<comment><USER32> Q-learning is not a lookup table from states to actions. It's a learned mapping (using any method you want, such as neural networks) from agent history (i.e. the agent is allowed to consider the past) & action pairs, to estimates of future reward, learned through temporal differences between the prediction at time step t, and the sum of new prediction plus immediate reward at time step t+1.

In this way, information can flow back in time as the agent learns that some observation is predictive of reward, and then learns some observation is predictive of that observation, and so on until it connects the reward with some action K time steps ago. So long-term planning is definitely possible.

This does require that some relevant information be available at each intermediate time step to connect the actions with the ultimate reward. The nice thing about these Atari games is you can usually judge value just by what's immediately on the screen, and in this paper they only use the last three frames' worth of state. In a game requiring a memory for past sensory information (e.g. where information appears on the screen then disappears), this might not do so well, but that's more a matter of working memory than long-term planning, and a different Q-learning system could contain a working memory (e.g. if it was RNN-based).

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER33> PDF:

[http://arxiv.org/pdf/1312.5602v1.pdf](http://arxiv.org/pdf/1312.5602v1.pdf)

<comment><USER22> No, this is a new paper.

</comment></comment><comment><USER26> I am wondering that what kind of real life problems could be modelled this way.

<comment><USER34> >> I am wondering that what kind of real life problems could be modelled this way.

Driving a car? Making a taco? Working the checkout counter?

<comment><USER26> So could you define an cost function for these activities?

<comment><USER27> I suspect setting up motivations for the AI is going to be a big research issue before too long. If you can write a simulator for the task you want to it solve, you should be able to train it. Often writing the simulator is much easier than solving a task itself. For example, the atlas robot, then can simulate it but struggle to control it.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER35> For comparison: [http://www.cs.cmu.edu/~tom7/mario/](http://www.cs.cmu.edu/~tom7/mario/). That is way more of a hack, but I am not sure this is that big a step forward. Space invaders and breakout aren't the hardest games and I haven't heard a hard argument that it is just a matter of scale to create a machine that, say, plays chess.

<comment><USER36> The biggest differences are this:

1\. The Mario algo has direct access to the game state, and will only work for games where it has that game state access. The DeepMind algo plays directly from the screen pixels. That means DeepMind has to first learn to interpret time varying (!) visual information correctly, then deduce rules and good play strategy on top of that leaky abstraction. That's hard. It also means the algorithm can be applied to any game with a screen output, not just to an Atari.

2\. The Mario algo is doing a direct search through move space. It can back up and explore a different branch of the tree and play differently to see a different outcome. When the DeepMind algo plays Atari, it can't undo a move that it just did. It has to make good choices, using intelligence, just like a human player would.

The impressive thing here is not that it plays Atari games. You're right, we have had AIs that can do this for a long time, even better than this. The impressive thing is that it's a single AI algorithm that works for many games, and that is learning directly from the screen. We have not had anything like this before.</comment></comment>


Why create a facebook app now? - <AUTHOR>

<comment><USER2> Free advertising. Even if you just get your friends to add your app to try it out - that gets broadcast to all of their friends who look at the news feed (I'd guess that few people don't). And if any of their friends are bored and happen to try out your application, then it keeps rippling out.

The trick of course, is to build something compelling. The platform will only mature with time, and the really compelling applications - that aren't just profile-based applications, or aren't heavily rooted in a site off of Facebook - haven't been built yet.

That's where you come in :)

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> Why create a facebook application now given that there are thousands out there already and facebook has created lots of restrictions preventing the viral growth that the earlier apps experienced. Even the new ones like the one released by Yahoo only have 5000 users.

It may have made sense in the beginning - Can anyone see any benefit of this now? or is it just hype ?

</comment><comment><USER3> Lets think about it like this, what happed when Microsoft released an OS and restricted the App developers, gave them hell. Well they wrote a new OS right. So when facebook doesn't go to bed with the app developers .. ummm, I am just wonderin out loud.

<comment><AUTHOR> Well - its not really about facebook. They are also responding to their users telling them to stop apps and that its spamming them.

But as a company, why would you create an app now if at all? Whats the business benefit if any ?

<comment><USER4> traffic and service recognition with a very focused market group. facebook's valuations, as inflated as they may be, could hold some truth based on the market they have targeted themselves into.</comment></comment></comment>


A simple mechanism could have been decisive for the development of life - <AUTHOR> https://phys.org/news/2018-05-simple-mechanism-decisive-life.html <comment><USER2> So how would this process work in the context of a self-organizing criticality (SOC) [0]? I've long taken that to be one of the more plausible mechanisms for getting to simple automata.

I guess this could work in conjunction with SOC, providing discrete stages for development. Interesting stuff.

[0]: [https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Self- organized_criticality](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Self- organized_criticality)

</comment><comment><USER3> This is one in a number of papers exploring how biological phase separation/condensation may have provided favourable microenvironments for early life development.

For a nice primer on what biological phase separation is, see this (non- paywalled) general audience article from earlier this year in Nature ([https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-018-03070-2](https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-018-03070-2)).

Some other work on phase separation as a means for primordial evolution and biochemistry includes a paper from Christine Keating in 2012 (WAY WAY ahead of the curve) [1], elegant work by Frank Jülicher [2], and more recently a nice paper from Keating and Phil Bevilacqua [3].

These papers (IMO) tie rather nicely into some theoretical predictions on self-organization from Jeremy England [4].

[1] Keating, C.D. (2012). Aqueous phase separation as a possible route to compartmentalization of biological molecules. Acc. Chem. Res. 45, 2114–2124.

[2] Zwicker, D., Seyboldt, R., Weber, C.A., Hyman, A.A., and Jülicher, F. (2016). Growth and division of active droplets provides a model for protocells. Nat. Phys. 13, 408.

[3] Poudyal, R.R., Pir Cakmak, F., Keating, C.D., and Bevilacqua, P.C. (2018). Physical Principles and Extant Biology Reveal Roles for RNA-Containing Membraneless Compartments in Origins of Life Chemistry. Biochemistry 57, 2509–2519.

[4] England, J.L. (2013). Statistical physics of self-replication. J. Chem. Phys. 139, 121923.

<comment><USER4> Phase separation really seems to be a hot topic in biology beyond early life development too, extending at least to the field of gene regulation.

A Phase Separation Model for Transcriptional Control. [https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/28340338](https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/28340338)

which already has 70 citations despite being published just 14 months ago.

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> > Boekhoven explains the principle of phase separation with an analogy: > "Imagine an old and rusty car. Leave it outside in the rain, and it > continues to rust and decomposes because rusting is accelerated by water. > Put it in the garage, and it stops rusting, because you separate it from the > rain."

Is the writer sure about this claim? I've seen cars and bicycles in the garage rust due to humidity and condensation, especially from the day-night temperature cycles.

<comment><USER6> It's the right analogy in the context of this research - the anhydrides survived longer when they formed a bubble, but still decayed.

A car in the rain rusts faster than a car in a garage. The sheltered vehicle still rusts... but the lower rate makes it feasible to maintain.

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> So basically by removing exogenous factors from the environment you get a chance to develop a more robust system. Sounds like an accelerator.

</comment><comment><USER8> I find it fascinating that we have not witnessed self reproduction and evolution in a simulated world as of now. Unless we manually put it in of course.

Any guesses when this will happen? Life springing up in a 2D-Automata or something like that? What size will it be? How many cells does the smallest self reproducing 2D-Automata need?

<comment><USER9> > I find it fascinating that we have not witnessed self reproduction and > evolution in a simulated world as of now

"The evolution of self-replicating computer organisms" (1996) [http://diyhpl.us/~bryan/papers2/ai/The%20evolution%20of%20se...](http://diyhpl.us/~bryan/papers2/ai/The%20evolution%20of%20self- replicating%20computer%20organisms%20-%20A.%20N.%20Pargellis.pdf)

4096x4096 grid. 16 opcodes. Randomly seed the field. Observe string replicators at surprisingly high frequency. Much simpler than y'all think.

<comment><USER8> Hmm... They created random computer programs and say that one in 10000 turned out to be self replicating.

But that is just because they gave them all the necessaray tools to do so. So the program only has to 1) Set pointer A to its beginning 2) Set pointer B to somewhere 3) Copy from pointer A to pointer B 4) Increase pointer A 5) Increase pointer B. 6) GOTO 1

If you look at the actual instruction set they use, it's even worse. They served the opcodes needed for replication on a silver plate.

That does not count. You could just as well give the programs an opcode that says "copyMyself" and say that creating life is easy because many programs used that opcode.

<comment><USER10> This is true, but not unusual. Any time you ask for the simplest/earliest/minimal X, you quickly get bogged down in the gray area of what exactly counts as an X.

So the above doesn't count, okay, make it a bit stricter and it takes a few orders of magnitude more computation to generate self replication. A bit stricter again, another few orders of magnitude. Then we run out of computing power, but can conjecture that by the time you get to the physics of our universe, self replication will presumably still appear at least once in, say, every 1e1000 Hubble volumes. Which is still silver plate territory compared to e.g. Conway's game of life, which has no uphill paths. So you get to pick what level you're satisfied with.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> > This one neat trick can develop life, the void HATES it!

<comment><USER12> Oh how I wish we all weren't trying to abuse human psychological weaknesses to get cheap clicks and views. At this point I'm tempted to dump the entire Internet just like I dumped TV... Then I remember you can't live without it nowadays. Then it swallows me back.

<comment><USER13> You know what, I'm gonna back you up, you got a point. But it's certain human psychological weaknesses that lead us to abuse human psychological weaknesses to get cheap clicks and views. Just take it as something fun to observe and think about.

No, I don't go to parties either.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> I investigated this in a simulation 8 years ago, link here and a paper in the description [https://youtu.be/UVyTu3o2A9U](https://youtu.be/UVyTu3o2A9U)

<comment><USER15> I have no idea what I watched. Can you ELI5?

</comment></comment><comment><USER16> Is it so hard to believe that there's a creator maybe?

<comment><USER17> Who/what created the creator then?

And please don't say "the creator has always been there", because the same could be said about a universe to make a creator redundant...

<comment><USER18> Since that argument cuts exactly as well both ways, why bring it up at all? We're talking about information content here more than metaphysics.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> We are disusing something so ridiculously as we were trying to explain how a baby alone could possibly win the FIFA World Cup 2018</comment>