Update on the Bain Experiment

For my next few repetitions of Bain, I followed my own advice in the Scheduling Expanding Repetitions article for batches C+D and E+F, but stretched out a little the repetitions for A+B (which already had extra repetitions):

Day 1:  A1+B1, A2+B2
Day 2:  A3+B3, C1+D1
Day 4:  A4+B4, C2+D2
Day 6:  C3+D3
Day 8:  A5+B5, C4+D4
Day 9:  E1+F1
Day 11: E2+F2
Day 13: E3+F3
Day 16: A7+B7, C5+D5, E4+F4
Day 23: E5+F5
Day 30: C6+D6
Day 37: E6+F6, A8+B8, C7+D7













My performance on A8+B8 (i.e. the eighth pass of A+B) had fallen a little from A5+B5.  My performance on C6+D6 had also fallen a little from repetition C4+D4.  C+D and E+F both had the same repetition intervals up to the sixth pass, but my performance on E6+F6 was better than that on C6+E6.  Its advantage had more than halved since the first repetitions of these batches, but I expected the gap to have narrowed more.  This raises the suspicion that E+F might have been a little easy relative to C+D.  However, the chart below shows the number of problems that were solved in under 5 seconds on my first pass through each of the batches:

The overall picture is clearly one of steady improvement.  [Diagram corrected 28 May 2011.]

The results suggest that increasing successive repetition intervals by a factor of 1.9 rather than a factor of 2.0 might give better results for these simple problems.  The precise optimum intervals are likely to be player dependent, however, and have to fit your schedule.I did the seventh pass of C+D on day 37, to even up the performance over the batches, so that I could revise the whole of Bain in one day for future repetitions.  I also moved the next repetition forwards (repeating the two week repletion interval) to boost my performance.  By this stage, I could easily carry out a pass through the whole of Bain in a couple of hours, even when tired.