Hello, folks,
I've reported this as a bug, but thoguht it might be useful to see if anybody else has had the problem. I'm currently having two problems that may be related:

a) items due still sticking and not reducing to zero, even after refreshing several times in the middle of practising

b) no. of items due jumps considerably in the middle of practising. So in the last 24 minutes of practising, I have gone from 750 or so to 220 to (suddenly) 460.

I'm not sure what the conditions are for b) to occur. Anybody else experiencing this?

As a result of these oddities of scheduling, I'm not sure that I'm learning as efficiently as I might otherwise be; on the other hand, Skritter is still more efficient than anything else I've tried!

Best wishes,

Will

I don't fully understand the details of how items are scheduled, but I have noticed one thing that may explain some of what you're seeing.

I think that the review queue is not a pre-determined, fixed list of items. Rather, it will change dynamically as you practice based on the results of your reviews.

So if you begin practicing (at say, 10am), you may have 200 items in your queue at that point. But your queue is not going to go to zero after you review 200 items. There are several things that may extend the number of reviews:

--- If you get an item wrong, it will be rescheduled for a shorter interval, and may in fact come up again before you finish your practice session.

--- Even if you get an item right, it may be rescheduled for an interval that causes it to come up again during the course of your practice session (particularly for new items).

--- You may have other items scheduled for review that come due during your practice session. In our example, you started practicing at 10am with 200 items in your queue. This means that at that point in time, there were 200 items that were scheduled for review at or before 10am. But there may be other items that were scheduled for 10:10, 10:15, 10:30, etc. If you practice for a while, those items make their way into your queue as well, increasing the number of items in the queue.

I don't think any of these factors explain things like a dramatic sudden jump from 220 to 460 like you're reporting, but I think there are definitely expected ways that the queue can expand during practice.

Thanks for the thoughts. Yes, there are good reasons why the queue might expand as well as contract; but it is the dramatic and sudden nature of the expansion, and the fact that the queue stubbornly resists ever going down to zero, that makes me a bit suspicious that there is something a bit buggier going on...

Anyway, if I see any pattern to this, I'll post again.

Will

A bit more info that may help in getting to the heart of this. There is not just upward jumping, but also downward jumping (which is harder to account for).

So this morning I started to practice with about 700 items.

After 35 minutes this went down to about 420.

I took a break from Skritter for about 10 minutes, came back and reloaded. Now the number of items due was 250.

Any ideas?

What I imagine is this is a bug with the dynamic counting system. To make it more efficient, we try and call the server as little as possible to check on the number of items left to review, and move it up and down as you study dynamically. The jumps may be the corrections when the client calls the server to get the exact number of reviews left and finds out it somehow got way off track counting by itself. Nick will have another look at it though when he gets back in a couple days, so hopefully this will get fixed soon.

But the wrong numbers in the review bar shouldn't have any effect on what you're studying! So that's the good news ;) If you want to make sure of that, check out the % numbers in the prompts to see if they gradually go down, so that you're studying the oldest ones first. It may jump around a little, but it should by and large go down as you practice.

You can also use the home page as a way to check the exact number. It counts directly from the server.

One more thing that occurs to me as a potential factor causing changes in the review queue is the interaction between individual characters and words that contain those characters.

Let's say that I have three separate items, the character 你, the character 好, and the word 你好, in my review queue (which means that the current time is later than the time at which they are scheduled for review). I then review 你好, getting it right. Is it possible that by demonstrating I know both the individual characters 你 and 好, I might potentially push the review time for those individual characters forward into the future, thus essentially removing them from my current queue?

Yes, individual characters and tones will get eliminated in course if you do the words, so multiple "items" may get chunked out of the blue bar per prompt.

There is a definite bug in the Genius with this, but as Scott said, it's pretty harmless as long as you refresh every once in a while once you're getting down to items that are around 100% due. I will maul upon it shortly.

OK, thanks for the insights.
All the best,
Will