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Last active March 8, 2018 06:35
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TILbot

TILbot

TILbot helps you reinforce what you learn. Get started by giving TILbot a question and answer, just like you were creating a flashcard. TILbot calls these TILcards. Congrats, this is your first act of learning reinforcement!

Your First TILcard

Let's say this is your first TILcard:

Question: What is the meaning of life, the universe and everything?

Answer: 42

TILbot knows that humans forget things easily, so after two days, it will ask you your question again. You'll provide a new answer, and then see your original TILcard. Here's where things get interesting!

Successful Recall => Increase Time Between Reinforcement

If your new answer is essentially the same as your original answer, congrats! You've successfully reinforced and validated what you had learned. TILbot will now start increasing the time between reinforcement. You'll be asked this question again in a week. More successful recalls lead to longer intervals of review.

Failure to Recall => Decrease Time Between Reinforcement

If your new answer wasn't quite right, it's OK, humans forget, and TILbot will help you learn. You'll be asked this question again in two days. If you get it right next time, you'll be asked again in a week. If you forget after a week, TILbot will bring this question for your review every two days again.

Review Schedule

Every successful recall increases the review interval of a TILcard, while every failure to recall decreases the review interval of a TILcard. This is called the Review Schedule. Here's the default Review Schedule for TILbot.

  • 2 days
  • 7 days (1 week)
  • 21 days (3 weeks)
  • 60 days (2 months)
  • 180 days (6 months)

Evolution of an Answer

TILbot knows that not all questions have a stable answer and expects answers to change over time. For example:

Question: What is the meaning of life, the universe and everything?

Answer: To learn how to live a healthy, productive life which creates happiness for you, your family, and your community.

Questions like these should change over time and TILbot can help you reinforce a newly evolved understanding of a question. Just tell TILbot your latest answer should be treated as the canonical one...for now! When a TILcard gets a new canonical answer, TILbot resets the review interval back to two days so you can deeply reinforce this new understanding.

More Ideas

  • Social Learning: See what TILcards others are creating and adopt them as your own.
  • Tagging: Tag TILcards and measure which topics are getting lots of attention, what topics are learned quickly or slowly, and what topics are showing an evolution of understanding.
  • Custom Review Schedules: Some TILcards might need a shorter review schedule than what's provided by default.

Vaporware

TILbot is currently vaperware. If you think you'd be interested in giving a beta a try please sign up. If you have a great idea for improving TILbot, please feel free to leave a comment on this gist.

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