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RichardKennaway comments on Open Thread, May 11 - May 17, 2015 - Less Wrong Discussion

3 Post author: Gondolinian 11 May 2015 12:16AM

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Comment author: sixes_and_sevens 11 May 2015 10:16:37AM *  0 points [-]

An idea: auto-generated anki-style flashcards for mathematical notation.

Let's say you struggle reading set builder notation. This system would prompt you with progressively more complicated set builder expressions to parse, keeping track of what you find easy or difficult, and providing tooltips/highlighting for each individual term in the expression. If it were an anki card, the B-side would be how you'd read the expression out in natural language. This wouldn't be a substitute for learning how to use set builder notation, but it would give you a lot of practice in reading it.

There's an easy version of this you could cobble together in an afternoon which has a bunch of randomly-populated templates it renders with MathJax or something. There's a more sophisticated extended project which uses generative grammars, gamified progress visibility and spaced-repetition algorithms.

I've been thinking about putting something like this together, but realistically I don't have the time or the complete skill-set to do it justice, and it would never get finished. Having read this thread about having difficulty in reading mathematical notation, I'm convinced a lot of other people might benefit from it.

ETA: it was probably misguided of me to liken this to Anki decks. I'm not talking about generating a bunch of static flashcards to be used with an existing system like Anki, but something separate that generates dynamic examples of what you're trying to learn, against which you'd record your success at parsing each example in a way similar to Anki. There are, of course, all sorts of problems with memorising specific examples of mathematical notation with an Anki deck, which respondents have prudently picked up on.

Comment author: RichardKennaway 11 May 2015 12:40:59PM 1 point [-]

An idea: auto-generated anki-style flashcards for mathematical notation.

Auto-generated exercises might be better. Compared with e.g. learning a language, there aren't many elementary components to mathematical notation to be memorised.

The exercises might be auto-rated for complexity, and a generalised Anki for this sort of material would generate random examples of various degrees of complexity, and make the distribution of complexity depend in some way on the distribution of your errors with respect to complexity.

Language learning materials might be similarly generalised from the simple vocabulary lists that flashcards are usually used for.

Comment author: sixes_and_sevens 11 May 2015 02:21:06PM 0 points [-]

I agree that auto-generated exercises would be a superior utility, but that seems like a much trickier proposition.

Also, for clarification, this wouldn't be used for memorising notation, but for training fluency in it. My use of Anki as a comparison might have been misguided.