Configuring SRS, limited by score limits

[chris.mounce]

I'm trying to get Pleco's spaced-repetition to have intervals similar to these:

5 seconds, 25 seconds, 2 minutes, 10 minutes, 50 minutes...​

It starts off very short (I'm tested 5 seconds after first seeing the card), but it grows by a factor of 5 each time. I got used to these intervals years ago (IIRC I was using Ebbinghaus for OS X) and it suited my learning style.

However, I couldn't configure Pleco's SRS the same way:

• I tried setting "Points per day" to 86400 (each point is worth 1 second). This worked for a while, but I soon discovered that cards have a hardcoded maximum score of 204800. This limits the maximum interval length:
  
  • Expected intervals: ...1 day, 5 days, 25 days...
  • Actual intervals: ...1 day, 2.4 days, 2.4 days...
• As a compromise, I then tried setting "Points per day" to 96 (each point is worth 15 minutes). This allows intervals of up to 5.8 years. However, new cards have a hardcoded starting score of 100, which limits the minimum interval length:
  • Expected intervals: 15 minutes, 1.25 hours, 6.25 hours...
  • Actual intervals: 1.04 days, 5.2 days, 26 days...

I guess I have three questions:

1. Is it possible to configure Pleco's SRS to have the intervals I'm used to, or something close?
   
2. If not, are there any short-term changes to Pleco that would make this possible? I'd suggest making the starting score configurable, but I don't know how hard that would be.
3. I read on the forums that there's an upcoming SRS update. I imagine that won't happen for a while, but I'm curious: would the SRS update make what I'm trying to do easier?

I purchased Pleco's basic bundle a little less than 2 months ago, and I've been loving it so far. It's really convenient to be able to create flashcards directly from the dictionary, and to have those cards include everything (text + audio)! I could switch to AnkiDroid, but I'd really like to keep using Pleco's flashcards because of the dictionary integration.

 

[mikelove]

The system doesn't currently support intra-session scheduling - once a session starts cards are in it or not, they can be repeated at configurable intervals if you get them wrong (option for that in Commands) but we don't try to apply SRS to intervals this short or to bring cards into a session that weren't scheduled at the start of it because a few more minutes have passed and that card is now due.

We actually consider that a good / defensible design decision, and if we were designing Pleco without any user feedback we'd probably keep it that way, but quite a lot of users would like it to support the sort of precise scheduling you're talking about, so despite our reservations, in our next major update we do plan to support intra-session scheduling and you should be able to have an arbitrary progression like you describe. (in the current design, our 'learning' state is a bit more nuanced than Anki's, and factors in the possibility of mixing different test types / fields in a specific / organized way, but as with their system and our 'repeat incorrect' mode you can put in specific fixed interval progressions rather than relying on SRS math to get you there)

In the meantime, I think the best way to get the behavior you want would potentially be to mark every new card 'wrong' manually. That way, you could get 2 precisely timed intervals with the "repeat incorrect" "during test" option in Commands (only supports up to 2 extra reviews, but you could, say, repeat the card once at 1 minute and once at 5 minutes) and could get them to a lower default score since they'd now be going to the minimum score you configured (hardcoded minimum is 10) at that first review (which would not be changed on those 'repeat incorrect' reviews) instead of to 100. Marking a card correct on the first review would be a convenient way to identify a word as one that you already know + add it to the queue with much less aggressive scheduling. Also do make sure to set 'day type' to 'hours,' and keep your sessions very short - after say half an hour stop the test and start a new one (won't lose any progress) and that way you'll pick up cards that were scheduled to come up a short while after your previous test started or were rescheduled with very short intervals during the previous test.