You May Be Able to Get There From Here

I recently discovered a profile of Piotr Wozniak and his creation, SuperMemo, written by Gary Wolf last year in Wired. SuperMemo is a database and program that, using an algorithm, provides a person with repetitive, timed review of facts and other memorized items— its computational flash cards, not unlike what we all used in grade school, and biology students continued to use in college.

“SuperMemo is based on the insight that there is an ideal moment to practice what you’ve learned. Practice too soon and you waste your time. Practice too late and you’ve forgotten the material and have to relearn it. The right time to practice is just at the moment you’re about to forget. Unfortunately, this moment is different for every person and each bit of information. Imagine a pile of thousands of flash cards. Somewhere in this pile are the ones you should be practicing right now. Which are they?”

“Twenty years ago, Wozniak realized that computers could easily calculate the moment of forgetting if he could discover the right algorithm. SuperMemo is the result of his research. It predicts the future state of a person’s memory and schedules information reviews at the optimal time. The effect is striking. Users can seal huge quantities of vocabulary into their brains.”

Photo: Patrick Voigt

The eccentricities of Wozniak seem easy to point out. For instance, “One of his most heartfelt wishes is that the world have one language and one currency so this could all be handled more efficiently. He’s appalled that Poland is still not in the Eurozone. He’s baffled that Americans do not use the metric system. For two years he kept a diary in Esperanto.” But Wolf takes care in the article to consider how the  idiosyncrasies of Wozniak the person are revealed in his program. Despite some early and sustained commercial success, SuperMemo has never changed how computer users remember things. (Indead, the current trend (e.g. Remember the Milk and other ‘Getting Things Done’ applications, too numerous to list as examples) is toward rapid capturing information and systematically storing it.) Yet, as Wolf observes, this is probably not why SuperMemo faulterd as a product:

“… Wozniak has ridden SuperMemo into uncharted regions of self-experimentation. In 1999, he started making a detailed record of his hours of sleep, and now he’s working to correlate that data with his daily performance on study repetitions. Psychologists have long believed there’s a correlation between sleep and memory, but no mathematical law has been discovered. Wozniak has also invented a way to apply his learning system to his intake of unstructured information from books and articles, winnowing written material down to the type of discrete chunks that can be memorized, and then scheduling them for efficient learning.”

More over,

“… one of Wozniak’s friends who worked as a manager at the company during its infancy, thinks that Wozniak’s focus on his own learning has  tunted the development of his invention. “Piotr writes this software for himself,” says Murakowski, now a professor of electrical engineeringat the University of Delaware. “The interface is just impossible.”

There are several ancestors to SuperMemo, I’ll list the applications that are maintained and free.:

• The Mnemonsyne Project, a cross-platform research and study application.
• Genius, a memorization program for OSX
• Anki, which is an application I’ll be trying out to refresh my Spanish vocabulary and commit some math principles to memory
• spicyelephant.com/, is a web-based implementation of the concept

Writers and thinker Bruce Sterling, and his alias Argento Bruno*  have hypothesized about our current century.

• The True 21st Century Begins, Argento Bruno
• 2009 Will Be a Year of Panic, Bruce Sterling

In Argento’s reading of history, there was a gap between the last century and the current one:

Eight years late, the 20th century has finally departed us this year. It will never return.

The “true” 20th century — the Communist century — began in 1914 and ended in 1989. We are now in the true 21st century.

After 1989 we enjoyed a strange interregnum where “history ended.” Everyone ran up a credit-card bill at the global supermarket. The adventure ended badly, in crisis. Still, let us be of good heart. In cold fact, a financial crisis is one of the kindest and mildest sorts of crisis a civilization can have. Compared to typical Italian catastrophes like wars, epidemics, earthquakes, volcanoes, endemic political collapse — a financial crisis is a problem for schoolchildren.

Argento considers differences in American and European sentiment: How a shared political and economic history, foremost the wars of the 20th century, give members of the two continents very different answers to political and cultural challenges of the future and the economic turmoil that will surely overshadow the next decade. He is, nonetheless, optimistic:

The year to come is best approached as a learning opportunity. It offers a golden chance to bury our dead prejudices and learn how to properly feed the living. Once we stop shaking all over and scolding Americans, we will recognize the tremendous potential this new century offers the people of the world. The sun still shines, the grass still grows, we are still human. If we stopped pretending to be puppets of an invisible hand, we would not fret over the loss of the 20th century’s strings. We might see that life is sweet

* It’s classic, but 21st century use of a pseudonym— Bruce Sterling is Bruno Argento.

There’s a fascinating interview with Daniel Tammet, an autistic savant best known for reciting 22,514 consecutive digits of Pi. Tammet, though, seems to spurn his categorization as savant, and finds other classifications of intellegient as a poor indications of how people really think:

When I was a child, my behavior was far from being what most people would label “intelligent.” It was often limited, repetitive and antisocial. I could not do many of the things that most people take for granted, such as looking someone in the eye or deciphering a person’s body language, and only acquired these skills with much effort over time. I also struggled to learn many of the techniques for spelling or doing sums taught in class because they did not match my own style of thinking.

I know from my own experience that there is much more to intelligence than an IQ number. In fact, I hesitate to believe that any system could really reflect the complexity and uniqueness of one person’s mind or meaningfully describe the nature of his or her potential.

The bell curve distribution for IQ scores tells us that two thirds of the world’s population has an IQ somewhere between 85 and 115. This means that some four and a half billion people around the globe share just 31 numerical values (“he’s a 94,” “you’re a 110,” “I’m a 103”), equivalent to 150 million people worldwide sharing the same IQ score. This sounds a lot to me like astrology, which lumps everyone into one of 12 signs of the zodiac.

Tammet also refers to an interesting ligustic bit, on the gendering of language:

Another finding, by cognitive psychologists Lera Boroditsky, Lauren A. Schmidt and Webb Phillips, might also offer a useful insight into an important part of learning a second language. The researchers asked German and Spanish native speakers to think of adjectives to describe a range of objects, such as a key. The German speakers, for whom the word “key” is masculine, gave adjectives such as “hard,” “heavy,” “jagged” and “metal,” whereas the Spanish speakers, for whom “key” is feminine, gave responses such as “golden,” “little,” “lovely” and “shiny.” This result suggests that native speakers of languages that have gendered nouns remember the different categorization for each by attending to differing characteristics, depending on whether the noun is “male” or “female.” It is plausible that second-language learners could learn to perceive various nouns in a similar way to help them remember the correct gender.