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chronicidal
Why did you change steps in min from 1 2880 to 10 2880 ?
What is your maximum interval?
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What do the lapses settings do?
Regarding steps: Because I make most of my own cards, I have some familiarity with them already and the cards are well structured, so I can afford a longer first interval (2 days or 2880 min). The length of the first learning interval has the most impact on the efficiency of your reviews. SuperMemo, the precursor to Anki, allowed you to set a 'forgetting index' (target % of cards you forget upon review), with the idea that something in between 6-14% was optimal in terms of efficiency versus retention. To achieve this, SuperMemo suggested a first learning interval of 2-7 days or something like that in most cases depending on the difficulty of the material. I get 92.9% correct on learning mode cards, which is about where I want it to be.
Because the 'again' interval of 1 min seems kind of short and reliant on working memory, I just bumped it up a little to 10 min. This one doesn't matter that much in my opinion. The idea is like doing the part of the mini mental status exam where you ask the patient to remember three items and then to recall them later. You have to wait a few minutes for it to mean much in terms of short-term memory capacity and resilience against distracting tasks.
The concepts behind why one should increase intervals at the loss of retention are two-fold: (1) You get diminishing marginal returns when you're trying to get 95% or more retention. You'll be doing repetitions so frequently that the workload becomes impractically inefficient. You have to balance efficiency in terms of acquisition of new knowledge (expect 200-300 facts per year for every minute you spend reviewing daily = all of First Aid in an hour a day for a year and a half) versus retention. Target 6-15% forgetting. See
this SuperMemo page for modeling that explains this idea. (2) You remember facts better after you're forced to recall them at the point when you have almost forgotten it. Increasing your first learning interval makes your mind work a little harder to remember most facts. While you might spend more time on each card before you recall the answer (maybe even half a minute!), this sets you up for longer review intervals later on and more durable memories, so I'd like to think it balances out.
The maximum interval I have is 36500 but this setting doesn't really matter much in my opinion. My longest review interval currently out of all my cards is 6 years. Where this setting might matter is if you find research or believe that your long-term memory has a finite upper limit of retention duration that is shorter than your lifetime. But probably Anki will cease to exist as a program and something better might come along (e.g. chips that program memories into our brains) before that happens.
Lapse settings are for when you have a young or mature card and you forgot it, so you press 'again'. The next review interval after this lapse is then dictated by your lapse settings. For instance, if you have a card that you've lapsed on 8 times, chances are it's not a well-formulated card, so it's labeled a leech (on your time and energy) and suspended. Also, in most situations a lapse doesn't mean a fact is totally unfamiliar to you, you just couldn't free-recall it. That's why I don't set the lapse intervals to as if they were fresh new cards. If I had a card that had a 1 year review interval, I forgot it but it was at the tip of my tongue and very familiar and the card jogged my memory pretty well, I wouldn't want to see that card for at least a few weeks. This is set as a percentage of the previous interval (20% of a year = 10 weeks would be the next interval).