• Welcome to the Speedsolving.com, home of the web's largest puzzle community!
    You are currently viewing our forum as a guest which gives you limited access to join discussions and access our other features.

    Registration is fast, simple and absolutely free so please, join our community of 40,000+ people from around the world today!

    If you are already a member, simply login to hide this message and begin participating in the community!

Anki Decks for remembering alg sets?

pjk

Administrator
Staff member
Joined
Mar 13, 2006
Messages
6,686
WCA
2007KELL02
SS Competition Results
In the How To Practice thread, the idea of using Anki Spaced Repetition System (SRS) for memorizing alg sets was mentioned. It's actually a great idea. Has anyone used anki or something similar to remember alg sets?

Anki is a program which makes remembering things easy. Because it's a lot more efficient than traditional study methods, you can either greatly decrease your time spent studying, or greatly increase the amount you learn.

Anyone who needs to remember things in their daily life can benefit from Anki. Since it is content-agnostic and supports images, audio, videos and scientific markup (via LaTeX), the possibilities are endless.

I thought it would be a good idea to start building decks for various alg sets. Would anyone else be interested in this? Or has anyone already built any? I've used Anki for helping learn foreign language vocab and images for a deck of cards, but yet to try it with alg sets.
 

Petro Leum

Member
Joined
May 3, 2012
Messages
800
Location
Germany
WCA
2012KALH01
Me and FJT97 created an Anki Deck for ZBLL, that is tagged into subsets (ZZLL and 2GLL as well), comes with pictures and multiple scrambles, and features fields for
-TH alg
-OH with right hand alg
-OH with left hand alg
-alternatives for everything
-Teamblind Codes

The cases are sorted with the standard AS/H/Pi/S/L/U/T system used by algdb, as well with the CxA etc. system (don't know the name)

I have personally used this to learn ZBLL algorithms and still use it to drill the algs for OH and TH, albeit with somewhat weird settings. I have also used it to learn Teamblind codes for all ZBLL cases.

I have also created a personal deck to learn comms and Letterpairs pretty easily by creating flashcards featuring Letters/Words and Commutator notation algs, and am currently learning corner comms with it.
 

FJT97

Member
Joined
Apr 3, 2013
Messages
434
WCA
2012THIE01
Me and FJT97 created an Anki Deck for ZBLL, that is tagged into subsets (ZZLL and 2GLL as well), comes with pictures and multiple scrambles, and features fields for
-TH alg
-OH with right hand alg
-OH with left hand alg
-alternatives for everything
-Teamblind Codes

The cases are sorted with the standard AS/H/Pi/S/L/U/T system used by algdb, as well with the CxA etc. system (don't know the name)

I have personally used this to learn ZBLL algorithms and still use it to drill the algs for OH and TH, albeit with somewhat weird settings. I have also used it to learn Teamblind codes for all ZBLL cases.

I have also created a personal deck to learn comms and Letterpairs pretty easily by creating flashcards featuring Letters/Words and Commutator notation algs, and am currently learning corner comms with it.

It works absolutely great for me. And it was quite a tedious job to make that deck :p took a crazy long time. But it was well worth it.

It’s super useful to have a deeper understanding of Anki though as using weird options and filtered decks is what makes it great.


In addition to what Simon said:
The structure is the following:

Front side: scramble and „OH“ or „TH“

Back side: Pic (from algdb) alg and alternative algs.


The caveat of anki is that working together doesn’t really work. While I could give you guys the deck it wouldn’t really be possible to use it as a forum-wide database or something as it’s not really possible to merge the changes of people. But i use it as a personal database and that is absolutely great. finding algs has never been easier. i have anki on my iphone and can just search for 'T2 cxc' for example and voila. its great. im in love with anki!


And BTW: if you are learning any other stuff, anki is absolutely great! Would recommend it in basically every situation. Check out r/anki too :) its so cool to see that anki made it in the speedcubing community!
 
Last edited:

pjk

Administrator
Staff member
Joined
Mar 13, 2006
Messages
6,686
WCA
2007KELL02
SS Competition Results
If I remember correctly, Egide Hirwa has used Anki Decks for ZBLL

This is the video I remembered but the link to the Deck doesn't work anymore.

Maybe if you get in touch with him he will send it to you
Great, thanks.

Me and FJT97 created an Anki Deck for ZBLL, that is tagged into subsets (ZZLL and 2GLL as well), comes with pictures and multiple scrambles, and features fields for
-TH alg
-OH with right hand alg
-OH with left hand alg
-alternatives for everything
-Teamblind Codes

The cases are sorted with the standard AS/H/Pi/S/L/U/T system used by algdb, as well with the CxA etc. system (don't know the name)

I have personally used this to learn ZBLL algorithms and still use it to drill the algs for OH and TH, albeit with somewhat weird settings. I have also used it to learn Teamblind codes for all ZBLL cases.

I have also created a personal deck to learn comms and Letterpairs pretty easily by creating flashcards featuring Letters/Words and Commutator notation algs, and am currently learning corner comms with it.
Awesome. Can you share your decks here so we can use them? I think it would quite useful if we had decks for various alg sets to help people learn them.


It works absolutely great for me. And it was quite a tedious job to make that deck :p took a crazy long time. But it was well worth it.

It’s super useful to have a deeper understanding of Anki though as using weird options and filtered decks is what makes it great.


In addition to what Simon said:
The structure is the following:

Front side: scramble and „OH“ or „TH“

Back side: Pic (from algdb) alg and alternative algs.


The caveat of anki is that working together doesn’t really work. While I could give you guys the deck it wouldn’t really be possible to use it as a forum-wide database or something as it’s not really possible to merge the changes of people. But i use it as a personal database and that is absolutely great. finding algs has never been easier. i have anki on my iphone and can just search for 'T2 cxc' for example and voila. its great. im in love with anki!


And BTW: if you are learning any other stuff, anki is absolutely great! Would recommend it in basically every situation. Check out r/anki too :) its so cool to see that anki made it in the speedcubing community!
Where is speedcubing on the /r/anki? Also, can you share your decks here too for others to use?

I got in touch with Anki with that deck.
I don't think anki will be able to help here. Your best bet is to contact Egide Hirwa and see if he still has it.
 

FJT97

Member
Joined
Apr 3, 2013
Messages
434
WCA
2012THIE01
Great, thanks.


Awesome. Can you share your decks here so we can use them? I think it would quite useful if we had decks for various alg sets to help people learn them.



Where is speedcubing on the /r/anki? Also, can you share your decks here too for others to use?


I don't think anki will be able to help here. Your best bet is to contact Egide Hirwa and see if he still has it.


yeah, we can share the deck. will post a link here. I have many algs there which arent on algdb yet. maybe there is a way to semi-automatically transfer those to algdb? no idea though.

And to the last point: that was a misaprehension due to my great english skillz :p. i meant to say that that deck of egide was the first time i used anki. i didnt know that anki existed before.
 
  • Like
Reactions: pjk

Thom S.

Member
Joined
Sep 26, 2017
Messages
1,292
I have many algs there which arent on algdb yet. maybe there is a way to semi-automatically transfer those to algdb?
You tell me which ones they you think are new and I add them for you
 
  • Like
Reactions: pjk
Joined
Aug 12, 2013
Messages
5,083
Location
Brazil
SS Competition Results
YouTube
Visit Channel
I've seen mixed reactions to this topic.


and


I'm thinking of using anki to learn some sets, as I'm not practicing anything lately.

Can someone add your experiences with anki to this thread?

at some time in the future I'll post here my experiences learning algs with anki.
 

Tao Yu

Member
Joined
Jun 29, 2011
Messages
1,172
Location
Ireland
WCA
2012YUTA01
YouTube
Visit Channel
I learned full TTLL using Anki. It got the job done, and was a fairly pleasant experience.

Later on I learned ZBLL using my own trainer. I preferred this to anki. Some of the reasons included:
  • I find it easiest to learn algs if I can see the alg set up on my cube and I can see what it looks like when I do the alg. So in my Anki TTLL set, I put the reverse scramble on the front of the card (rather than a picture) and when training, would set up the case on a real cube, and try to remember. This caused me to start to remember the scrambles, rather than the case.
  • I could randomize AUFs using my trainer, forcing me to learn some different angles.
  • I didn't feel like I really needed spaced repetition. What I tended to do was learn a set of 12 in one day, review the next day, and then review after a few more days. This seemed to be enough to cement the algs in my brain.
  • I found it easier to control what algs I was testing on using my trainer. This might just be me not understanding Anki well enough though.
  • The virtual cube in my trainer was a game changer for me. Even without it however, the above reasons are probably enough for me to stick to my own trainer.
I don't think Anki is bad, but my trainer definitely suits me more. Which, of course, is to be expected since I pretty much tailor made it to suit my own alg learning preferences.
 

Zarxrax

Member
Joined
Jan 7, 2009
Messages
1,282
Location
North Carolina
I think Anki is not ideal for learning algs for speedsolving, and I say this as someone who has been using Anki daily for about 15 years now.
The purpose of spaced-repetition software such as Anki is to remind you about stuff just before you forget it. So it's great for just making sure that you kind of know a lot of information, but its not great for making sure that you know that information well. With speedsolving, you can't just barely know an alg and sit there for a few seconds remembering it... you need to have it drilled into your muscle memory by having done it over and over and over.

If you just want to know a bunch of algs for FMC or something like that, it could be more useful.
 

SnowyDay

Member
Joined
Dec 5, 2016
Messages
68
Agree with @Zarxrax .

I think SRS is weak for learning. But SRS can be helpful to keep large amounts of information in memory for a long period of time. Vocabulary, medical school info, etc.

Anki has a good sized userbase. The UI can be modified and the software is quite stable but a bit clunky. The major problem IMHO is that Anki an older algorithm called SuperMemo-2 which I don't think is particularly good; the user can tweak parameters but that provides haphazard results IME.

The Super-Memo developer has modified the algorithm over the years for better memorization performance and is now on version 17. Version 15 costs just $2.

This site has a ton of information on memorization.

 

qwr

Member
Joined
Jul 24, 2019
Messages
3,371
YouTube
Visit Channel
I was dismissive upon first reading the title, since I think algs are more importantly memorized by muscle memory than letters, but now I'm curious for learning certain cases of f2l if it'll help. Is there an f2l deck?
 
Top