Life/Death, for a self-correcting system (typically biology but there are others, e.g. glaciers). If the system is alive and damaged it will roll back into a healthy equilibrium, but if it’s damaged enough it won’t be able to repair. (technically there are more then two equilibria here, e.g. chronic diseases)
Any two-player game with “score” such that once you’re winning it’s easy to stay winning / you have a snowball effect (e.g. chess), and vise versa. (this somewhat subsumes the previous example)
Human memory, some things you’ll forget if you don’t review them, but eventually it sticks where you’ll remember it “forever” without spending any effort on review
Bonus exercise
Forensics, given someone died we look for a “kick” (possibly a literal kick) big enough to get them out of healthy equilibria. Raising the hump is left as an exercise to the reader.
Look for mistakes that caused a winning player to lose their advantage. Can we change the rules of the game to make the barrier higher or lower? (e.g. a comeback mechanic)
How many reviews do you need to get over the hump? What kind of reviews? This system lives in a higher dimensional space, e.g. mnemonic based reviews will be more efficient then brute-force. You could also conceptualize “lowering the hump” as learning mnemonic techniques or generally getting better at learning.
Exercise
Life/Death, for a self-correcting system (typically biology but there are others, e.g. glaciers). If the system is alive and damaged it will roll back into a healthy equilibrium, but if it’s damaged enough it won’t be able to repair. (technically there are more then two equilibria here, e.g. chronic diseases)
Any two-player game with “score” such that once you’re winning it’s easy to stay winning / you have a snowball effect (e.g. chess), and vise versa. (this somewhat subsumes the previous example)
Human memory, some things you’ll forget if you don’t review them, but eventually it sticks where you’ll remember it “forever” without spending any effort on review
Bonus exercise
Forensics, given someone died we look for a “kick” (possibly a literal kick) big enough to get them out of healthy equilibria. Raising the hump is left as an exercise to the reader.
Look for mistakes that caused a winning player to lose their advantage. Can we change the rules of the game to make the barrier higher or lower? (e.g. a comeback mechanic)
How many reviews do you need to get over the hump? What kind of reviews? This system lives in a higher dimensional space, e.g. mnemonic based reviews will be more efficient then brute-force. You could also conceptualize “lowering the hump” as learning mnemonic techniques or generally getting better at learning.