Since I'm clearing out my accumulated draft posts, here's the most interesting article I read in 2008 (because I still find this article utterly fascinating and memorable eight months after reading it):
Gary Wolf, "Want to Remember Everything You'll Ever Learn? Surrender to this Algorithm," Wired Magazine, May 2008.
Wolf has written a fascinating article about Polish scientist Piotr Wozniak and his effort to remember everything he learns. Wozniak's attempt to learn English led him to create a computer program that would quiz him on vocabulary items at the optimum time for retaining them. This program, SuperMemo, eventually became the pivot on which his life revolved around. Wozniak largely withdrew from normal interaction with others to follow the program's dictates as to when to learn.
The article's discussion of the psychology of memory and learning is also quite interesting. I wish I had known this in school, especially when learning foreign languages, which is where the software really seems to shine. If I were learning a foreign language now, I would use a program like SuperMemo.
Related links:
- The SuperMemo website has interesting articles by Wozniak on memory and learning.
- A friend of Wozniak offers details of his own personal experience with him at Antimoon, a site for English learners.
- SuperMemo is the ur-example of spaced-repetition systems (SRS). Here's a good blog post on how they work.
- By many accounts, a major drawback to the use of SuperMemo is its poor user interface, so many would-be users use other products such as Mnemosyne, a free SRS that has a simpler interface but fewer features than SuperMemo (the program uses an earlier version of the SuperMemo algorithm).
