Skills

Skills are anything you can learn and become better at. <programming> is a skill, <cooking> is a skill, and even <playing computer games> may be a skill if you are interested in becoming better at it. In ExpLink, “becoming better” is expressed as earning and accumulating exp (short from experience), which is then converted into levels. Each subsequent level requires more exp than the previous one.

Relations

Skills are related to each other as parents and children. For example, <cooking> is a parent skill of <baking> or <cutting onions>. Though the relatedness degree differs (<baking> is obviously a more broad and difficult skill than <cutting onions>), you are becoming better at <cooking> learning or practicing either of them. That means that every time you get exp for one of the children skills, their parent skills get exp as well, depending on their relatedness score. Returning to our example, let's assume the relatedness score between <cutting onions> and <cooking> to be 1%. That means that if you were practicing <cutting onions> for some time and earned 100 exp, <cooking> will get 100 * 0.01 = 1 exp. Looks pretty insignificant, but <cooking> will get and accumulate exp from each of its children so just keep practicing little skills and your big and important skills will become better. Also, some of the skills can have a higher relatedness score. If we assume the relatedness score between <baking> and <cooking> to be 10%, from 100 <baking> exp, <cooking> will get 10 exp.

Creation and connection

Because people who want to start learning a new skill most likely don't know enough to create all the necessary relations with other skills, in ExpLink relations between skills are determined by AI. Every time you or any other user creates a new skill, AI evaluates possible relations and creates them (this process can take up to a minute, it is a pretty complex task). AI also generates skills descriptions and merges synonyms and translations into one skill. You can write your own description for each of your skills if you want (only you will see these descriptions). The provided description also helps the AI to better determine the skill's properties, create relations and generate a description.

Sometimes the skill name you provided can be ambiguous. In this case, AI will ask you to write a description to find out which skill exactly you meant to create.

You can select which synonym or translation to show for each skill in your skills page (just click the "Swap" button on a synonym or translation).

If the skill you want to learn already exists in the system, you can just connect it and start learning right away.