Memory test
Four tiles flash, then the numbers vanish and you tap them in order.
Four tiles flash, then the numbers vanish and you tap them in order.
Tiles flashNumbered, for a moment
The numbers goThe tiles stay where they are
Clear a roundThe next one is harder
Round one shows four tiles on a five-by-five grid, numbered 1 upward. After a moment the numbers disappear, leaving the tiles blank and in place. Tap them in ascending order from memory. Clear the round and the next deals one more tile; the last round fills all twenty-five.
One wrong tile ends the run, and your score is the number of tiles in the last round you cleared. Nothing is timed — this is a test of visual working memory, not of speed, and rushing it only costs you tiles.
It is a variant of the chimp test popularised by the Kyoto University work on chimpanzee short-term memory, where young chimps routinely beat human adults at exactly this task.
Most adults plateau between seven and nine tiles, which is the same span that shows up in every working-memory measure.
Visual working memory holds roughly four to nine items at once, depending on who is counting and how, and no amount of trying harder moves that ceiling much. What does move is chunking: people who score well stop memorising eleven positions and start memorising three shapes. That is a learnable trick rather than a bigger memory, and it is most of the difference between a first run and a tenth.
Unlike the daily grid game, the memory board is random every round — a board you have already seen is no longer a memory test. A link you share replays your exact sequence of boards, so a head-to-head is still fair.