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sissymaidlola -> RE: Swift enough (5/4/2005 7:22:39 PM)
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quote:
Oh, lola, you are such a hoot! I felt OLD after I played awhile. I NEVER got past the bobcat stage.. and I tried every conceivable combo of sound on, sound off, eyes open, eyes closed. I'm just slow. But WHO says fast is always good? Hmmm?
Well, dixie, if you are scoring in the Bobbing bobcat range consistently then your reflexes are just fine ... in fact, they are probably better than those of many younger people. So you are NOT slow ... although sissy agrees with you, slow is NOT necessarily bad either! If you look at the results of sissy's "what does it REALLY mean to say that a man has a 'poor libido' ?" poll you'll see that there were some voters that thought premature ejaculation did qualify as "poor libido" while, OTOH, no one thought that having to wank for two hours with a baseball mitt in order to come qualified at all. So there you have it ... slow is good, fast is bad! <giggles> [:D]
sissy Became fascinated by the "renegade sheep reflex test" that you posted and the scientist in him started investigating its structure and limits. The first thing he did was rather than seeing how fast he could respond in tranquilizing a renegade sheep, he tried seeing how slowly he could respond instead. So he let them run off the other end of the screen before clicking his mouse to shoot them. What he found was that if a sheep isn't shot within about 0.8 seconds it times out and your shot is applied to the next sheep (which means you automatically get the 3 second penalty for premature firing if another one hasn't immediately appeared - which is almost every time since the sheep are not generated that close together).
If you have ever completely missed firing at a sheep when playing and looked at your five actual response times used to calculate your average response time afterwards, you will see that a missed sheep is scored at 3 seconds. Which is where the automatic 3 second penalty comes from when you "jump the gun" ... you are penalized as if it had run and you completely missed it, and you also forfeit the next sheep - that is, one less sheep is scheduled to appear. So if you "jump the gun" five times in a row the game will end without a single renegade sheep ever appearing, and you'll have five recorded response times (penalties) of 3 seconds each, giving you an average response time of 3 seconds. That's the worst you can possibly do in this test / game ... you'll get exactly the same result if you never touch your mouse (i.e., never shoot) and just let five sheep run across the screen.
One of the things that prompted sissy to do the above was to determine the timing cutoffs for the five average response time categories, which are:
Turbo-charged cheetah: < 0.? seconds
Rocketing rabbit: .... 0.? - 0.2 seconds
Bobbing bobcat: ...... 0.2 - 0.3 seconds
Ambling armadillo: ... 0.3 - 0.7 seconds
Sluggish snail: ...... > 0.7 seconds
If you divide 3 seconds by 5 you get 0.6 seconds, which is why once you miss a sheep or "jump the gun" on one, you can never realistically achieve a better score than Sluggish snail ... even if you managed to shoot the other four sheep in a total of less than 0.5 seconds (Turbo-charged cheetah level performance) you would still only scrape Ambling armadillo status. As you probably quickly discovered, once you've missed one sheep, or "jumped the gun" and been penalized, you might as well just terminate the test / game and start over.
sissy Never made "cheetah" status so he has no idea what the response threshold for that status is. A few of the times sissy made "rabbit" status was because he "jumped the gun" but was fortunate enough to do it just as a new renegade sheep appeared and hence he clocked a response time of 0.00 seconds for the hit! That's not an accurate reflex measurement ... that's a fluke! But if you have four hits averaging around 0.24 seconds and then get a fluke of zero seconds then you'll end up with an average response time less than 0.2 seconds (and "rabbit" status). One can also get that status by clocking the majority of the five hits under 0.2 seconds, but that seems a much more difficult way to achieve it IsHO. Similarly, if the transition threshold between "rabbit" and "cheetah" is 0.15 secs rather than 0.1 secs (which sissy suspects it is) then two "near zero time flukes" added to three hits averaging just over 0.2 secs would have the same effect of giving you "cheetah" status.
sissy Has always had reflex responses at the high end of the spectrum, and although one gets slower with age (and sissy is pushing 50) one's responses don't degrade in tenths of seconds (e.g., 0.15 to 0.25 secs). But sissy was averaging just over 0.22 secs (test results between 0.21 and 0.24 secs) and was clocking hits as low as 0.17 secs. Two hits at 0.17 secs and three at 0.22 secs averages out at 0.20 secs which is right on the "rabbit" threshold, and a back-to-back string of his better hits accounts for all the other times sissy achieved that status. It's not unreasonable that folk 25-30 years younger than sissy have responses 0.03-0.04 secs faster, which would put them in the 0.17-0.20 seconds response time range most of the time (regular "rabbit" status) and achieving "cheetah" status for them would only require a single "near zero time fluke" - not the two consecutive flukes that you or sissy would require.
Dev10usM1nd did say that it took him "more tries than he'd like to admit" to achieve that status and that he "also found a nifty trick" in order to do it. That trick may simply have been running the test only with the intent of achieving a quick "near zero time fluke" up front ... then it only requires adding four regular hits around 0.18 secs to achieve the coveted "cheetah" status. If you fire early and miss and get penalized then you simply fire early another four times to abort the test so that you can start over.
Once he had calculated the time thresholds behind the five ranges and he had read the posts extant on the thread, sissy became even more intrigued by the internal structure of this test. Clearly, it is designed such that most people will fall into the 0.2 to 0.7 seconds ("bobcat" and "armadillo" status) response time ranges, with the very fastest and youngest only making the "rabbit" grade, and "cheetah" status is hard to achieve even if one is at the top end of the reflex Bell curve. So sissy did some googling around to see what human response times are meant to be and he found this web page.
The portion of that article that is really interesting is the graph at the end, where you can see that normal response times (the black line) for executing a simple activity (in this case, turning a switch) varied between about 0.4 secs to 0.9 secs. Given that simply moving your index finger to click your mouse is inherently simpler than turning a switch it might shave as much as 0.2 seconds off this more complex activity, so the "renegade sheep reflex test" range of 0.2 to 0.7 secs is completely in line with the article documenting the Henry-Rogers experiment, which was a really good sanity check. Consequently, if you were regularly scoring "bobcat" status, which means that your reaction times are in the 0.2-0.3 seconds range, you are far from being slow, dixie, but are probably in one of the higher reaction time percentiles. As for feeling old ... well sissy won't even go there <giggles> since age is largely in the mind (at least at our age it is ... when one is 85 that is something else!).
If you now read that article documenting the Henry-Rogers experiment, you'll learn that the pink line in that graph represents the same subjects' reaction times for doing the same chore (flipping the same switch) but this time under duress (they were told that they had to subsequently do more complicated stuff once they had flipped the switch). Simply knowing that they have more to do once they have flipped the switch puts them "under stress" relative to when they only had the switch to flip, and as the pink line clearly demonstrates, this stress can cause them to perform the same task with an increased reaction time of up to an average of 35%! A couple of the sample of fifty subjects performed the stressful switch flipping quicker than the non-stressful switch flipping, and a few more performed the two switch flippings in about the same timeframes, but the vast majority of the subjects took much longer (up to three times longer in one case) to perform the same switch flpping task when under stress. That's quite an astounding result if you think about it!
The Henry-Rogers theory that reaction time increases with added stress can be clearly demonstrated with the "renegade sheep reflex test." The advice to get a cup of coffee if you were scoring anything outside of the top two ranges is probably tied into this effect, too. sissy Found that he got his best results when he first took the test. The more you repeat the test in order to get a higher ranking the worse you seem to do ... the first few times he tried the test after a hiatus were the times he achieved his highest scores ("rabbit" status). sissy Had noticed this effect many years ago when playing other video games (such as Breakout or PacMan or Tetris or Gallaxion, etc.) that required increased physical dexterity and concentration in order to get to the next level. If you keep failing ... take a break ... then come back to it. Caffeine levels have a lot less to do with any resultant improvement in video game performance as taking a break away from the game, in order to go get that cup of coffee, ultimately does.
sissy Never knew about the Henry-Rogers theory until he found that article last night - he only knew his own personal experience with video games in the past as just related above. When he read the results of that experiment the light just went on. When we first play any new video game - and the "renegade sheep reflex test" can be considered a very simple video game - we make lots of mistakes, and so with each subsequent retry we see ourselves noticeably improve as we better understand the physical controls, the game rules, and even our goal or quest. Physical dexterity quickly improves with increased repetition, and with intense play, might even become a motor skill like touch typing or riding a bike! Consequently, we are conditioned to believe that more is better ... the more we play the better we will get, and with each new iteration, our "high score" will be higher. We fully realize that this is not a totally linear relationship, and that progress will be more subject to "ten steps forward, nine steps back" ... but overall, we believe in the aphorism: "if at first you don't succeed, try, try again!" This can cause us to play new video games for six, eight, or even more hours at a single stretch. Therein lies the addiction of video games!
At least that is what sissy always thought until last night. The real addiction is that we are actually fighting a losing battle with the consequences of that Henry-Rogers theory. While we are getting mentally more familiar and physically more adept with a new video game our scores keep improving accordingly ... but at some point we plateau. This time we played the game our high score was less than last time ... one step back, right? If only we hadn't done this or that we would have beaten our previous score and got to the next level ... but this time we won't screw up and we'll do it! Yet what the Henry-Rogers theory tells us is that once the stress of bettering or current high score - or getting to the next level, or successfully killing the troll, or achieving "cheetah" status, or whatever goal is driving us - kicks in, our performance at the game (relative to before we started obsessing about achieving that goal) may degrade by up to 35%. The more we now try the worse we actually perform ... [:)] It's almost a counterpart to Heisenberg's Uncertainty Principle in Quantum Theory which states that the more accurately one tries to measure simultaneous observables the more imprecise the results.
That "renegade sheep reflex test" amply demonstrates that "degradation with increased effort" effect better than anything sissy has previously come across. Most video games are much more complicated and there are 1001 reasons that one can berate oneself for having failed on the last attempt ("if only I had taken the right passage not the left; if only I hadn't dropped the controller in the middle of the Klingon attack," etc.). With the sheep reflex test there is only one button and only one rule (shoot the sheep ASAP), and you already possess all the physical dexterity you need in order to click on a mouse. So after playing it a couple of times through (at most) you are already at your optimum mental and physical skill level. This is when you are most likely to make your best score. Once you start playing it over and over to try and tranquilize the sheep quicker and quicker, the stress of doing that is probably making it less likely that you will ever achieve it. Catch-22! Now that's a no-win addiction if ever there was one! [:D]
So sissy is not quite sure if he should thank you for posting that test, dixie, but certainly if you had not done so sissy would never have discovered that article on the experiment that demonstrates the Henry-Rogers theory which so simply explains, IsHO, the futility and frustration that are both ultimately associated with video game addiction.
Respectfrilly Yours,
sissy maid lola
[image]local://upfiles/21203/7550AAD373274EA8911F0BC3852D002C.jpg[/image]
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