Wills Chess Blog
Adventures in chess in Cambridgeshire

Coathangers, Visualisation and mental anguish

By Will
Having memorised 33 games from GM ram last time around I thought it would be pretty simple to do it again. However this time I realised I needed to understand alittle more about aspects of learning to make the process more efficient. Last time I put together a simple repetition plan so that in a typical period I played through everygame at least a few times which, inevitably, became a monster to try to actually do.

This time I discovered an article on Wired magazine "Want to Remember Everything You'll Ever Learn? Surrender to This Algorithm" By Gary Wolf:

http://www.wired.com/medtech/health/magazine/16-05/ff_wozniak?currentPage=all

I usually am distrustful of such things since I have read a whole pile of chess "improvement" articles and books. However, the most interesting thing is that the algorithm is used in a free program called Anki which some kind soul has created a pgn plugin for.

My experience so far is that using the program with the game details is enough so organise the memorisation of the games in an efficient manner. I add 2 games a week and play through these everyday then they are graded by difficutly of recall and hey presto! the algorithm tells me when to review them. So far I have added 14 games in half the time it took first time around.

And like last time the other things I am reading about chess seem to stick much better. I am also reading the Yusupov Chess Fundamentals Build Up Your Chess and adding this to Anki to recall.
 

1 comment so far.

  1. AoxomoxoA wondering 18 October 2012 at 00:38
    How do you put these games into anki, each move one card?

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