Supporting Data

If you play The Hundred you will notice two things: It will be easy and quick to memorise and things will stick for much longer. The diagram below show this in action. The data was collected in Spark, a simple game built on the scintilla AI that was played by 10,000 people. This diagram has 64,000 data points and shows how quickly one of the players managed to memorise and how long it took her to forget. It shows what happens when you play for about 9 months.

You can see that whenever she plays the curve goes up and on days where she doesn’t play forgetting sets in and the curve goes down again. At the end of March, she played a lot and you can see a big peak going up to nearly 100. The AI timed the quiz questions well, and the answers stick for about 14 days. If she had played with the AI switched off, the peak would not even have reached 60 and the stick would have lasted only for 5 days. But with the AI it becomes a lot easier and quicker for her to take the knowledge in.

But this is not where the story ends. She kept on playing and after a few more months, her memory strengthened enormously. Now the stick lasted for 256 days. That is 18x longer! And it only took 40 more minutes of quizzing spread over three months. It is easy to see what would have happened if she had stopped the game in April: By May she would have forgotten most of the answers! She eventually stopped playing at the end of September and will forget more than half of the answers within a year. But this is not because she is not clever, on the contrary, she is very bright!

Forgetting happens to all of us when we stop revising. But just imagine what would have happened if she had stayed on! One or two more hours of quizzing spread over a few more months and she would have remembered the answers until she is old and grey.

This is why The Hundred is such a long game. You can play it on and off for a few minutes every day for a couple of weeks and months. You will amass a lot of knowledge and some of it will stick. But once you have played for a year, you start getting massive memory boosts. Like on a swing, when you get the timing right, you are sent flying!