Comments on: Human Reaction Times

By: Aimee Congrejo

Aimee Congrejo — Wed, 02 Apr 2008 21:12:04 +0000

Digging up an old thread since my comments aren’t getting Spamified anymore. LOL So here’s a dive into the Hyperkitty brain. xD

So first raw numbers. Urm…averaged around 200. So I’m not slow. But I’m not fast. But…

I *definitely* agree with Kasumi on the not being used to a twitch test. Like the only way to explain it is that there’s no flow…no rhythm…it’s like my first spar in the evening when I get home from work and I get destroyed. xD

Cuz like my brain sees the twitch test flash and just goes WTF like I don’t know what to do. It’s like deer in headlights before I figger out “oh yah, move my finger”. But in a spar I get into a flow and rhythm with both hands and react faster than my twitch test.

Now Judo on the baseball analogy thing totally explains my style. Like scary explains it. Cuz thinking about it made me realize exactly how much my style relies on reading my opponent as opposed to reaction time. O.o

Watch me fight. Like watch me close. Really close. I’ll have what appears to be *insanely* quick reactions when countering. Watching my YouTube videos…especially Brittany #2…I land slashes in like a 100ms window where she unblocks and goes back into block. Like my death blow to her in that video is a slash where she unblocks for a *split second*.

No way I coulda seen that. No way I coulda reacted to that. Period.

Watching the rest of the Brittany, Straight, and Shindo videos like shows something else. My opponent will be literally right in front of me and I’ll turn away or look up into the air and slash at nothing (I ATTACK THE DARKNESS LOLZ). I’m slashing at air.

Why? Cuz that’s where I *thought* they were gonna be. *sneeze*

Aimee Congrejo’s latest blog post is : Leaving Yakuza and going clanless for a while

By: Kasumi Hashi

Kasumi Hashi — Mon, 24 Mar 2008 22:06:14 +0000

Oh, and I agree with Judo about the prediction end of it, and how you know if you show someone one thing, they are most likely to follow with some other thing. I think a lot of people are faster than me at reacting to things from moment to moment but if I can possibly still get more wins its by being a tad more clever with how I set and change pace, switch up patterns, and predicting theirs.

By: Kasumi Hashi

Kasumi Hashi — Mon, 24 Mar 2008 21:59:19 +0000

One thing I found with the test was how much I’m not used to trying to time a mouse click quickly. I don’t do games and C:SI was a huge struggle at first, so at least for me I think any speedy reaction I do have is with my left hand on the attack keys. With C:SI the mouse click is coordinated with what you want to do, but doesn’t necessarily have to be all that well timed, at least compared with the attacking keys.

By: Takuan

Takuan — Mon, 24 Mar 2008 14:57:22 +0000

Slower than me

WhooHooo!!!! I’m faster than *TWO* people now!

In all seriousness, I’d obviously hoped to see a stronger correlation, and I still believe that I would in RL, but there doesn’t seem to be a strong connection for SL.

I strongly remember one summer years ago, during an Aikido seminar where the founder of our school (Minoru Kurita sensei) came over from Japan to teach us, how profoundly impressed I was by his reaction times. When we would just begin our attack with the bokken, he would already be moving, already know what we were going to do as we began the strike.

He’d shouted “First rule of Aikido: GET OUT OF THE WAY!”, then proceeded to show us how, if your mind were calm and still, you could react spontaneously and appropriately no matter what your opponent does. If you are not where the opponent’s sword will strike, you do not have to block, and can then use his committed action against him.

The result looked magical to me, so quick were the reactions, and so perfect.

Often times I’ve seen people watch a video or live demonstration of Aikido and make comments that “they’re faking it” or “that ukemi is doing all of the work”, and while there may be more or less truth to that during public demonstrations and among various schools, if they’d ever had the truly awesome opportunity of first-hand experience of attacking a master martial artist like Kurita-sensei they would surely show much more respect.

By: vint falken

vint falken — Mon, 24 Mar 2008 12:17:12 +0000

250.6 … I’m slow? :/

vint falken’s last blog post..SL musicians Get It Together

By: Kasumi Hashi

Kasumi Hashi — Fri, 21 Mar 2008 02:28:38 +0000

249.8 for me

/me cries

By: Malachi Rothschild

Malachi Rothschild — Thu, 20 Mar 2008 23:14:26 +0000

Oh yeah it was 215, 220, not 115, 120 for me. xD

By: Takuan

Takuan — Thu, 20 Mar 2008 04:27:35 +0000

Tracking two consenting user’s keystrokes at millisecond resolutions is possible in Second Life. I have some code that I use quite frequently that performs exactly that function (for one person).

Correlating them might be more challenging, though.

*wanders off in thought*

By: Colin

Colin — Thu, 20 Mar 2008 04:19:06 +0000

I think you’d have to log both users’ key strokes with a timestamp that is ideally at the millisecond level. That doesn’t sound like something that would be very reliable in the environment of SL. If you are really serious, maybe write an external program to log the events that volunteers would run on their computers when they sparred. But then there’s still the problem that the two programs running on each persons’ computer would have to have their clocks synchronized to within a millisecond.

By: Judo Jung

Judo Jung — Thu, 20 Mar 2008 04:17:53 +0000

I am surrounded by psychologists! Most of them are nuts (I am not of course ;-)). To test, I guess one of the training tools could be adapted to measure average ms reaction time, place the tool at popular combat sites (Meiji, Edo, etc) and ask people to try (is that a random sample? probably not), record the data, and correlate with their CSI record (which I know is an imperfect indicator of skill, but the best we have). Best experimental design I can come up with at 9:15pm after two glasses of wine!! Now back to watching American Idol. Oh the horror.