The Genius is done and in final testing. I won’t upload it until the new front page goes up, possibly tomorrow or Saturday, but I’m excited so I’ll describe how awesome it’s going to be.
What the Genius does is make loading scheduled items much smarter. The Kitten still figures out what you know and schedules words for review, on the server side. But on the client side, the Genius loads words for you to study and keeps track of the current batch.
The ramifications are many and powerful:
- We can now start to add words while reviewing, instead of only after reviews are cleared. You can control whether and how soon this happens.
- You can now overpractice, either a little (clearing words that would have become due shortly) or a lot (disabling adding and reviewing the most ready words as long as you want).
- Words are now sorted nearly perfectly by how ready they are (much better!).
- You can choose your target retention rate, with 95% as default.
- Our retention rate is now your real retention rate, instead of “ratio of prompts answered correctly.” It’s about twice as high, so old 90% is roughly new 95% and old 80% new 90%.
- The “to review” and “added” bars should be more responsive.
- The first word will load faster and you should see fewer loading delays.
- Everything is much more efficient on our servers and your connection.
Most fetching! This isn’t up yet, because the new front and try-it pages aren’t quite done. We will cheer on Scott and George as they heroically smash their way toward the finish, yes.