Study Tool for Anki

[mkmatlock]

I noticed that some people on the forum are using spaced repetition with the Anki software to study Go. Unfortunately, the process for creating cards for study of Go positions in Anki is pretty unwieldy, and doesn't allow playable problems.

To the end of improving the experience, I have created a new note-type which incorporates a d3.js based board display script so users can paste in SGF data and display problems.

The script can even detect when it is running on a touch device, and enables a special touch play mode to prevent accidental mis-plays.

There are a couple of supported card modes.

1. You can enable adversarial play, where the user can play out the problem against the computer (pre-determined moves as per the SGF). Deviation from the SGF or a terminal branch where the opponent plays last is marked 'incorrect', whereas terminal branches were the player plays last are displayed as 'correct'.

2. You can also use a traditional card mode, where the "front" of the card displays the board state at move 0 of the SGF, and the "back" of the card has a tool for navigating the variations stored in the SGF.

You can get started just by downloading the deck, but the add-on has some nice import functionality to make it easier to add large numbers of SGF files to your decks. The deck is required, as it defines the note-type.

Deck: https://ankiweb.net/shared/info/567570018
Add-on: https://ankiweb.net/shared/info/2140853965

Let me know if you find bugs. This software is in a very early stage of development.

[SamT]

Hey - I wanted to say thank you for this. I am just getting into Anki and I love your card format. Very well done. I'm surprised more people haven't started using this.

The only issues I had:
1) I couldn't get your importer to work as it kept trying to break my SGFs into separate "fields." After looking over a few cards, I figured out how to do it manually -- just cut and paste the SGF in, set the crop area and true/false for the other two settings. Having the importer streamlined and working would make the card creation process faster, yeah, but the real cool part is how the cards work.

2) There's no documentation about how to format the SGFs so they port over cleanly -- I had assumed (wrongly) that there would be separate "question" and "answer" SGFs and it took me a while to figure out they should be one contiguous file.

Useful tips to include in any future help file:

a) Only the last positions of each variation will show on the answer card. Only the text from this card will show as well. (In between moves and notes are lost unless you are playing through the card live).

b) Use your SGF editor to add numbers, letters, or other markup, and it will be preserved

[SamT]

It is very awesome I'm sad more people aren't using it!

One question: I noticed that you have A and B's in your cards, but when I try to make a card with them, I lose them. Everything else -- X, circle, triangle, numbering -- works just fine, but A's and B's, especially on the board, seem to disappear.

Any idea what I can do work around it, or what might be causing it?

(I am using the latest release of DRAGO to make my SGFs.)

Edit: I seem to have cracked it. I have to use the add-text button and manually type it in.

[Rhuarc]

Love this! I have been lurking around here for awhile, and have dabbled in Go, but am just recently getting more interested. I use Anki for studying for my day job, and think this would be an amazing way to add both variety to my daily Anki use, and at the same time get better at Go.

Has anyone created any cards yet for varying difficulty problems?

[SamT]

There aren't a lot of anki decks for Go shared yet. I'm pretty much just making my own messy little pile of problems - about 107 so far. They're not meant for public consumption, and a few have typos. One card even has two (probably incorrect) guesses about why a certain sequence is correct, as I could find no explanation elsewhere. Another card has literally 22 variations on it, because I haven't sat down and figured out a better way to break the card apart.

I'd say about a third of them are how to identify and punish mistakes in one of the four main Large Avalanche josekis. It's taken between 10 and 14 hours to get just that one done, so I haven't had the appetite to finish up the other three yet.

If you're inferested in trading decks, PM me and we can work out the details.

[SoDesuNe]

There aren't a lot of anki decks for Go shared yet.

As you say yourself, there are a lot of copyright problems involved. I made eight books into Anki sets and the process naturally becomes faster and faster. But I can't (and won't) make any of them public.

Though one suggestion: Make sure you take a "correct" answer before making an answer card. Putting two maybe correct answers on it, let alone 22 variations for one problem card goes - in my opinion - against the actual idea of spaced repetition. If you want to cover many moves in one position, make different problemns for each moves.