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Comment by femto | Hacker News Reader

It would make sense if you could get electronic textbooks which are already in the question/answer form required by spaced repetition software, ready to "load and learn". Rather than reading a traditional textbook, you would take an equivalent question/answer set and learn it by spaced repetition. Do such things exist?

Following on from that, maybe such question answer sets could be automatically generated from the semantic web? A simple example would be a question/answer set about capital cities, but could one pick an arbitrary subject and manufacture a list of questions about it?

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> It would make sense if you could get electronic textbooks which are already in the question/answer form required by spaced repetition software, ready to "load and learn". Rather than reading a traditional textbook, you would take an equivalent question/answer set and learn it by spaced repetition. Do such things exist?

I am working to solve exactly this. A form of learning where the learning happens due to interaction between a bot and a human. Machine teaching humans basically. Been working for over 20 months. Will be releasing within two weeks. :)

I'm guessing your username is relevant :). Using AI for intelligence amplification? Excited to hear about your project.

Haha. Thanks. The project doesn't use AI at all. I figured out that you don't really require the system to pass turing test in order to develop tutoring system. It can assist in clever ways. That being said, Primer ( the tutoring system ) will teach ML/DL/RL courses. For more info, you can subscribe to the mailing list here, https://tinyletter.com/primerlabs/. I will post within two weeks.

keep me updated please, good luck.

Thanks. You can subscribe to this mailing list, if interested. https://tinyletter.com/primerlabs/

I would like to know more about this. Do you have a mailing list I can add myself to for a notification when you release?

Thanks. You can sign up at this mailing list: https://tinyletter.com/primerlabs/ here. I created it just now.

Also interested, would love to sign up if possible :)

Thanks :) You can sign up at this mailing list for a while. Expect a mail within two weeks for the launch. https://tinyletter.com/primerlabs/

Well, creating the questions and answers yourself is actually part of the effort required to learn effectively.

Strongly agree with this. I'm a medical student with a flashcard deck of 25K cards. The cards I remember best are the ones I took the time to create.

This wouldn't work that well, you don't learn a complex subject just by flash cards.

First you need to understand the subject, then you can formulate useful flash cards, then you can work on remembering them.

What's the deficit in using a premade card set? Does it not work at all (for you?), take longer, focus on the wrong weaknesses?

Take much longer to learn, but especially they can't be applied when learned as I don't know why I need to learn those things, how they belong together, when it is important that a situation is slightly different and when not, et cetera. There's no knowledge, just factoids.

A friend of mine had a startup aiming to do that in Singapore: optimised learning by frequent recall of byte-sized factoids (comprising a whole coherent subject area though) with a targeted success rate (similar to the SuperMemo spaced repetition method). It was called TokTol (Tree of knowledge, tree of learning), and produced some nice study units (mostly adapted to the Singaporean high school curriculum in the sciences).

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