Abstractopia — a hands-on companion for training abstract reasoning¶
Most of this site is a reference: a catalog you read. Abstractopia is the opposite end of the same idea — a place to practise. It is a small web app that trains one skill directly: recognising the encyclopedia's patterns out in the world, far from where you first met them, and telling them apart from the look-alikes that only seem to fit.
It is deliberately unlike a quiz app. You never meet a pattern through a single example; you compare two surface-dissimilar cases and put the shared structure into your own words before the app names it. Each pattern then returns spaced out over days and weeks, wearing a new disguise every time, and the hardest credit — the top mastery states — is earned only when you recognise a pattern in a domain the app never showed you, after a real delay, and can say why. There are no streaks-for-consumption and no completion bars, on purpose.
It is an honest experiment, and it might not deliver. Far transfer — spontaneously applying a pattern in a context remote from where you learned it — is famously hard to produce, and the app says so up front. The defensible claim is narrower than "this will make you transfer knowledge across any domain": it is that the app trains analogical reasoning using a curated catalog of cross-domain patterns, and that better analogical reasoning is a plausible engine of insight. Whether it delivers is exactly what a small group of early users is helping to find out.
Try it: abstractopia.org — best on a phone or in a modern desktop browser. It runs entirely on your device, keeps nothing in the cloud, and works without an account. (Currently a research-preview prototype; expect rough edges.)
The full rationale: Training and Measuring Cross-Domain Transfer: The Design of Abstractopia — the design and its grounding in learning science, with references, and an honest account of what is and isn't proven.