The Daily Five
Five events, one run, about two minutes. One number out of five thousand.
Five events, one run, about two minutes. One number out of five thousand.
Straight throughNo pause between events
Capped per eventNo single event carries a run
One numberOut of five thousand
1. Grid. Thirty-five seconds of a fresh board: tap 1, 2, 3 and on — clear all fifty for full marks. 2. Aim. Twenty seconds of targets, one after another. 3. Stroop. Twenty seconds of colour words printed in the wrong colour — answer the ink. 4. Memory. Numbered tiles appear, the numbers vanish, you tap them back in order; rounds grow until the clock stops you. 5. Reaction. Three goes at the five lights.
Each event is worth up to 1,000 points, measured against a reference a good player would hit, so the total runs to 5,000. The cap is what keeps the run honest: being brilliant at one thing gets you a thousand and no more, and the way to a high total is to be decent at all five.
There is no pausing between events — a card names the next one for a couple of seconds and then it starts. The whole run takes about two minutes.
The server scores every event from its own copy of the board. Your browser's breakdown is shown for interest; the total that counts is the one that came back.
Most people find the same thing on the first run: one event is much worse than the rest. It is usually Stroop or memory, because those two are the only ones that are not simply fast tapping, and twenty seconds does not leave room to settle into them.
A single score is easy to shrug at. Five give whoever opens your link something specific to answer — they do not have to beat your total, only your worst event, and that is a much smaller thing to talk yourself into.
The five events are always the same five, in the same order — it is the boards that are new every run. A challenge link carries the sender's, so the two runs it compares are on identical boards, event for event.