Use the correct statistics

There will be times when you have statistics that seem to be telling you exactly what you want to know.  They seem to be so clearly tied to your goals that there wouldn’t be any reason to think they might be giving you the wrong idea.  But sometimes, even these stats can be leading you astray.

Let’s say you have the following two options:

• Option A - Earn 1 point every turn.
• Option B – Roll a fair die every turn.  Earn 5 points if you roll a 6, otherwise earn nothing.

Your goal is to analyze the options.  Which is better?  Well, A gives you 1 point every turn guaranteed, and, using very basic statistics knowledge, B gives you 5/6 points every turn on the average.  So…  A is better.  Right?

Rhythm Lines first release

Copied from the video description:

Now you can play Rhythm Lines too!  Download it here: https://skydrive.live.com/redir?resid=3CB0B68BD7EA7268!116&authkey=!AOwhMJodsEq0tIA&ithint=file%2c.zip (runs on Windows, the bottom of the screen may be cut off at lower resolutions).  If there's any problems, leave a comment and I'll try to fix them.

Forgot to mention in the video: when a circle appears in a hit icon, you don't have to press that hit icon unless the circle reverses and moves back to it.

The game features 7 original songs (9 songs total) and 14 completed charts.  But be warned, it's definitely not an easy game.  There is one chart that's actually meant to be a beginner chart, a few kind of easy (or maybe very hard, depending on your perspective) charts, and then a bunch of really hard and even harder charts.  Hey, at least there's a half time feature now.

Keys:
S,D,F,G,H,J,K,L - the 8 buttons to hit

In menus:
Left/Right - Change song (hold tab to change faster)
Up/Down - Change difficulty
V/N - Change player for high scores (my best is included under player 5)
-/+ - Change timing offset (hold shift to change by 10ms)
M - Toggle !rorriM mode
H - Toggle half time mode

General rules:
There are 8 hit icons corresponding to 8 keys on the keyboard.  Colored circles represent notes to hit, and when they pass through a hit icon, you must press the corresponding button.  The notes follow tracks.  If a track is dark grey, the note will reverse once after reaching the end of the track.  If a track is black, the note will reverse multiple times.  The color of the note is based on the speed the note will travel.  From slowest to fastest, the colors are green, blue, yellow, orange, red, and black.  As mentioned above, when a note appears inside of a hit icon, you don't need to press that button, unless the note reverses and comes to the hit icon again later.

You can store 4 different sets of high scores in different player files (the 5th player file has my high scores).  If you fail a song, you can continue playing but you'll receive a fail grade at the end.  Failed scores count on the rankings too, but are only given 60% of the actual score earned.  On the song select screen, your best grade on a chart is shown next to the chart.  Exclamation points next to the grade indicate the highest full combo level earned on the chart, up to a max of !!!! for a full perfect.

You can use the unranked half time mode for practice.  There's no music, but there is a tick noise on every beat.  Mirror (!rorriM) mode flips the location of all notes horizontally.

Daniel's Intelligence Trainer

If you don't care about a bunch of theory and just want to play some games, or if you don't care about "training your intelligence" but you could go for a couple cool puzzle games, go ahead and scroll down a few paragraphs.

So I've been developing my own theory on intelligence, what it is and how it works and so on, and I decided to put together an "Intelligence Trainer" program based off of my ideas.  I won't go into extremely rigorous details of the theory here, but roughly, the part of the idea that is relevant here is that, by practicing a variety of tasks that require a certain skill, you will improve your ability to perform other tasks that require the same skill, even without direct practice on those other tasks.  I think this sounds very reasonable.  If you learn how to play piano songs from sheet music, then you should be able to learn how to play any song that doesn't have something new or too difficult, even when those songs aren't the ones you originally practiced.  The skill you learned isn't [playing specific individual piano songs by looking at the sheet music for the song] but a broader skill of [reading sheet music to play any piano song from the sheet music].  This concept of improving something more by practicing basics and fundamentals appears all over.  In sports, you do drills not so that you become good at the drill, but that you become good at a skill that applies to more areas.  In school, in general you do homework not so that you learn how to answer your exact homework problems, but so you become good at solving all of the problems of those types.  Now, the relationships between different tasks are not always obvious.  Take Dance Dance Revolution and Beatmania, for example.  One requires you to press 4 buttons with your feet, and the other requires you to press 7 buttons with your hands and turn a turntable.  But, the mental process you must perform is very similar.  You must read a stream of notes, interpret it as a sequence of actions to perform, and then perform those actions.  The actions are different, but the mental processing is similar.  (In the same way you could have some tasks that seems quite similar on the surface, but actually require very different mental processes.)

So, if you become good at a broad set of tasks by improving fundamental skills, what are the fundamental skills of intelligence?  I would say memory and associations between memories.  Now this is another claim that ought to be supported, but I won't go into that here either, other than saying that I believe all of human reasoning can be explained as a combination of memory and associations.  So, the above would imply that you just do a bunch of different memory games and a bunch of different logic games and your intelligence should improve.  "Well that sounds too simple," yes, that is too simple.  Some people will improve more, and some will improve less, so what causes that difference?  The answer this theory provides is: it depends on your current ability in the area in which you are trying to improve (and your ability will depend on a combination of talent and practice).  Also, the extent to which the improvements will extend to other tasks will depend on the method you use to perform the task.  Returning to the rhythm games examples, if you are naturally talented at rhythm games, or if you have had practice in some similar task that allows you to pick up rhythm games more easily, then you can probably play a wide variety of songs and levels and see large improvements.  However, if it's something completely new and foreign to you, you probably don't want to try hard levels or a lot of different songs.  You'll want to start with something basic first, and slowly build up.  Next, if you were to learn a song by memorizing the specific steps to the song rather than reading the notes, well, that method would be less effective in helping you pick up other songs as opposed to learning how to read notes from playing the song (but in this case, it's much harder to memorize the steps to an entire song than it is to learn to read the notes, so most people will naturally do the second).

How does this apply to intelligence?  Well, if your memory is very good, then you probably want to try a large variety of memory tasks, and do tasks that require using memory in ways that feel brand new to you, tasks that are at a difficulty level that will challenge you.  If your memory isn't that good though, then you'll want to do simple memory tasks that are slightly challenging for you.  This doesn't mean that variety is bad, but, you want to make reasonably large improvements in the tasks, and, even when you do, the improvements may not transfer to different tasks as quickly (as you'll have to build up lower skills first).

So, to answer the obvious question, "What makes your intelligence trainer better than, say, Luminosity, or the dual-n-back task?" I have two answers: a lot of related variety, and inductive reasoning puzzles.  Each game focuses on a general concept, but builds up the complexity.  The goal is to make slight adjustments to the mental process required for each task.  At a very simple level, in The Shuffle you have memorizing numbers and then letters and then numbers and letters.  But for most people, those will probably feel pretty similar.  As you move up, you have to memorize out of order, and then memorize in order, but the order changes.  To do this, you could use a similar mental approach: memorize information, and also memorize an order, just on one level the order remains constant and on another it changes.  The goal is to provide enough variety in the game so that there is a lot of room to broaden your ways of thinking and memorizing without being too focused on a single task.

As for inductive reasoning, as far as I know Luminosity doesn't have any inductive reasoning tasks (but I'm not a member and haven't visited the site in a while, so I don't know).  An ability to perform inductive reasoning well could be the major skill possessed by people who can think critically, solve broad problems, be creative, create new knowledge and more, but, regardless of how broad the applications may or may not be, strong inductive reasoning will always be beneficial.  This game currently offers 2 inductive reasoning games, with a few others planned out but not implemented yet.

The last note is that there is still going to be a lot of value in Luminosity, and the dual-n-back, and anything else.  Rather than a complete replacement to other options, you should consider it as an alternative that's also worth trying out.  This alternative aims to improve over others in certain aspects and incorporate concepts that are not a part of other intelligence training tasks, but even then, you'll want to look at variety, and do a lot of new and different things.

This program is far from complete, and there are many new games that may be implemented (some fully planned out and some just concepts), as well as improvements to all of the current games that might be put in.  Of the things I want to add, a long-term memory game tops the list, as there aren't any of those yet and I have a couple ideas for some.  But if you're interested in trying out the current version, here it is: https://skydrive.live.com/redir?resid=3CB0B68BD7EA7268!115&authkey=!APK5P22g58xbtJc&ithint=file%2c.zip.

If anyone's interested in a mac version, feel free to comment and I can make one.

Read on for my comments about the program.

Testing Out

There I was, ready to enter my first semester of college, and all I heard was how it was going to be difficult.  It didn’t matter if high school was easy for you because a lot of people could say that.  And those people always found out quickly that this wasn’t high school anymore.  This was a tough college, and you either studied and worked hard, or you dropped out and went to an easy college or something.
But I couldn’t believe any of that.  It wasn’t going to be true for me, I said.  I think I’m an exception to that rule.  People made so many rules: you can’t do this and you can’t do that and if you act like this you must be this type of person and if you think like that you must be that type of person.  And sure, the rules were usually right.  Usually.  But not always.  And I would say, no, no, no, I’m different!  I’m not like other people!  I am the exception!  Or well, I didn’t actually say that to anyone, but.

School never meant much to me (but it made me feel like a genius).

I'm sure there are many people that would be happy with simply doing what they were good at.  If you're really good at something, why not get famous for it, make money doing it, essentially just live your life doing that?  Like I said I bet most people would be happy with that, and there's nothing wrong with that.  But for me, I didn't value that as much.  Maybe if it was for the sake of others or because I really enjoyed it, maybe then I wouldn't mind.  But otherwise...  Well if you're always just doing what you're already good at, then how do you ever learn something new?  How do you ever improve yourself?

For me, school was something I was really good at.

I say I was really good at it, and someone who had the full picture might say, "Now that's a pretty big understatement right there."  I was really good at it.

I really wanted to learn something from school.  I wanted to learn something new.  I wanted to improve.  But more than learning or improving, it always felt more like a very tedious task.  Like if you were told to count a bunch of dots.  They say you have to practice it a lot so that you learn how to count, and I would feel like, "Well, I already know how to count; I don't doubt my ability to count a bunch of dots."  In a class it would be them telling you a problem and the method to solve it.  And I knew how to recognize problems, and I knew how to use methods.

I know I heard some time that students only remember some very small percentage of what they are taught after a class is over.  I'm pretty sure I don't fit in that category.  Maybe my general memory was just very good.  Or maybe my memory organization was very good.  Either way, I tended to remember everything.  Everything that was important, that is.  I was almost always able to determine, during the class, the big picture, the key points, the most important details, and then the smaller details that were less important but sometimes worth remembering.  And then I would walk out, walk in for the next class and think, "All right, I remember the big picture, I remember the key points, the most important details, and even some of the smaller details."  And they would say, "All right, let's go back to what we discussed last class.  Let's look at more examples so you can see the big picture.  Let's highlight the key points in more clarity.  Let's examine the details to determine what's most important," on and on for weeks.  Internally I'd yell out, "I know all that.  I got it already!  I already got it!!"

Let's go back to the counting analogy.  If you think of it as a real class, then this would be like what I would hear, and what I would think, and [everything else that I didn't care much about].
Okay, so the class is a class on counting a bunch of stuff by hand manual target enumeration in a 2D space.  And we're going to spend 4 weeks on the most important concept of this class: partitioning.
If you have a whole lot of stuff to count a number of objects on the order of magnitude of 10^5 or higher, then it will take too long to count everything one by one... [Paragraphs on why it would take too long to count everything one by one along with plenty of examples...]
So that's why some really smart person from the past developed the partitioning method!  Let's consider the most basic form of partitioning: square partitions on a rectangular grid.  [Paragraphs on what square partitions and rectangular grids are along with plenty of examples...]
Now what is the benefit of partitioning, you ask?  Well let me ask you this: if every partition had the same number of objects inside, then how would you compute the total number of objects?  Multiply the number of partitions by the number of objects in one partition!  [Paragraph explanation]
And then, you could get the number of partitions by multiplying rows times columns! [...]
But what if every partition doesn't have the same number of objects?  This is why it's better to try and guess the average number in each partition compute an Empircally Determined Partitioning Average (EDPA).  [...]
[Many paragraphs on choosing partition size]
[Many paragraphs on using rectangular partitions instead of square partitions]
[and so on...]

Now I'm probably bad at estimating people's abilities to learn and understand and memorize, but doesn't that all sound pretty simple?  If you have a bunch of dots that you want to count, you can break it up into smaller sections, guess how many dots are in each section on the average, and multiply that number by the total number of sections.  I think most people would be able to remember that concept, even after only hearing it once or twice.  For me that's how most classes felt.  The concept would be simple enough to me, so it's not like it would be something that I would forget.  And then the explanations of how to apply the concept and why it was important and necessary and all of that would go on and on and on...

Sometimes, it even felt like I could have come up with the ideas myself.  Now that was something I wanted to learn to do.  I didn't want to memorize a bunch of effective methods to solve a bunch of problems.  I wanted to learn how to take a problem and determine an effective method to solve it.  I wanted to learn things that were broader and more powerful.  And by that, I mean things that were basic and simple, and how they applied to broad areas.  Think about this: you could learn that by breaking up a large grid into smaller pieces you can count a whole lot of stuff by hand, and so you've learned a method to do just that, count a lot of stuff by hand.  But, you could also see it as: by breaking up a larger problem into many smaller pieces, when you can take a solution to the smaller piece and apply it to the larger problem, you can more easily solve the larger problem, whether that is... counting a lot of stuff by hand, or running large computer code in parallel, or performing a complex task...  If you learn like that, then what you've learned is not just a method to count a lot of stuff by hand, but a concept that applies to many more areas.  I wanted to learn that.  Simple concepts and methods and ways of thinking and reasoning that applied to most anything and everything you wanted to do.  But that's not what school taught you.  Not that that doesn't make sense.  Most people go to school to learn how to solve their one problem, and keep solving that problem over and over, so why would you want to teach applications to any and every problem?  You just teach people to solve their one problem that they are going to solve, over and over.
For a better example of broad applications, take addition.  If someone teaches you the sum of 19+37, then, well, you know the sum of 19+37.  But if you learn how to add numbers, then you can figure out the sum of any two numbers.  Now if someone asks you to add 19+37, well it might take you more time to calculate the answer than someone who's reciting the number 56 from memory, but you know how to add.  And if, beyond that, you understand the basic concept of addition, then you can understand how to add, say, binary numbers or hexadecimal numbers, even without learning how to do both explicitly.  So, if you are taught 19+37, and then you are taught 19+38, and then 20+39 and so on, have you learned something new?  If you don't know a general method for adding numbers, it sure looks like it.  To someone who doesn't know how to add, it might look really impressive.  You now know what 19+37 is, and what 19+38 is, and you can even add crazy stuff like 191+372.  Now you know a lot.  But most people know how to add, and they'll say, "Well wait a minute, that's just the same concept; it's not that impressive."  If you know how to add, then it's pretty meaningless to talk about how many specific combinations of numbers you can add.  You should be able to add all of them!  But then, surely learning to add different types of numbers, like binary numbers is new and different and meaningful, right?  Well I don't know.  Because it's actually really similar.  You can use the same method; you can apply the same concepts.  If you understand that, then you should be able to add numbers in any base.  There's no need to be taught how to add base 9 numbers specifically if you know the higher concept.  It's not something different.  If you wanted to learn something more, you would have to go beyond the concepts you already know.  For this example, you'd have to learn something like multiplication.  But, is that actually any different?  If you understand the concept of a binary operation, and are able to take the rules of a given operation and develop an efficient method to perform the operation within the group to which it applies, then maybe not.  You should be able to make sense of any operation, not just addition and multiplication.
For me it always just felt like I was learning everything on one level higher.  They would teach me 19+37 and I would say, "I got you.  I get how to add numbers."  And then they would go on to teach 19+38 and 20+39 to the people who were more focused on reciting 56 and 57 and 59.  And then they would teach how to add binary numbers and I would say, "Oh I see, there's a system behind it all and that's how it works."  And then they would go on to teach how to add in hexadecimal to the people who weren't looking for some larger system or some broader reasoning behind addition.  Take that to the level of individual classes, and they would say, "Here are some new classes!" and I would say, "I know how to memorize and I know how to think logically, especially in a manner that is going to let me succeed in a class when you teach the class how most classes are taught."  And anyone would say, "Well look at all the new and different stuff you learned!" but to me it just felt as if every class was so frustratingly similar.

As the classes went higher, they just felt more complex.  More "complex."  And more specific.  But for me it was just more of the same.  Determine what's important.  Memorize that.  Determine the key concepts.  Memorize them.
Like if you were to go farther in manual target enumeration with partitions, and learn that you can compute the EDPA by extending a line in both directions through the approximate 2D median of the objects in the direction of the density gradient vector, and taking the average of manual enumerations of evenly spaced samples of partitions that lie on this line.  And I would say that it's not that complex, you're just saying that if you want to count dots by hand using partitions, then you can guess what the average amount of dots is in each partition by drawing a line from areas with lots of dots to areas with few dots, and averaging the number in some of the partitions along this line.  You can lecture on it for hours, and you can tell me chapters to read and assign sets of homework problems, but it all feels so pointless because it's something I already understood.  It's not something I'm going to forget.  It's something I actually did come up with myself.

And it just went on.  And on.  And on.  And it always felt like such a waste of time.  And my mind turned into a broken record, repeating, "What am I doing here?  Why am I doing this?  Isn't this just a waste of my time?"  In some classes I would space out.  Plan out a new game, or attempt to solve some random puzzle or plan out a game strategy.  Sometimes doze off in the after-lunch class.  Yet somehow I always managed to hear just enough to know all the important stuff, so I never had to study.  The extent of my studying was usually something like 20-30 minutes refreshing my memory before an exam, and that was all the studying I knew.  And along with those other questions another one often popped up, asking, "Why am I an A student?  Why am I the one who's acing every exam?"  There were many people who always took notes, always went to office hours, studied diligently, carefully completed all the homework, and never came close to matching my performance in classes.  But I never told anyone, so no one ever knew.  Not that I was acing every class, and not that I never put the least bit of effort into it.  It wasn't even that I was someone who didn't want to try hard.  There was just never any reason to do so.  I could have learned the things more effectively, or practiced more and solved them quicker, but it never felt like it was benefiting me, in terms of learning and in terms of grade.  A 90% was an A and an A was the highest letter grade, so I saw everything beyond 90% as just safety points.  They weren't good for anything but ensuring that I kept an A grade.
And then, sometimes there were things that I didn't get perfectly.  Even those, I probably knew better than most of the other students.  Just, I didn't have them down as strongly as I had other concepts.  I didn't know everything there was to know about the concept.  I hadn't reached that broader level.  "Well yeah, you're just a student, so you're not supposed to understand everything in perfect detail," the voice representing possible responses from the average person says.  But that was a problem for me.  I stopped caring about whether I knew my stuff really well, or whether I just knew it well enough to get an A.  If it was an easy concept for me, then I'd just hear it and understand it and know it really well.  If it wasn't, then I'd know there were missing pieces, but it never mattered cause I could always understand it well enough to get an A.  I mean, it was always just memorizing something and understanding some logical concepts.  It wasn't like I was doing something new to me (the concepts were new but memorizing and thinking logically wasn't), so it never felt worthwhile to develop an understanding of all the concepts to the level which I believed I was capable of.  Any desire I had to develop a complete understanding of the subjects got washed away, washed away with any of the motivation I had ever had in school, in a never-ending sea of why's.
Why?

Why?



Why?

Even now I'm not sure.  "Why?  Why didn't you do more there then?" the voice asks.  I don't know.  I didn't care enough to.  It's not that I hated the subjects, just, I didn't really love them either.  And I wasn't connected.  There was no reason to ask professors for help when you didn't need any help.  And I just couldn't imagine going in saying, "Hey yeah, you know, I think you're teaching the class too slow for me, and not in a broad enough manner.  Could you just change the class to some really broad class that contains the older, narrower, simpler version of the class but goes beyond that too?  Or, better yet, could you tell me the fundamental problem the class is trying to solve so that I could try to solve it myself.  I think I'd get more out of it that way."  Yeah.  That wasn't really my style.  And there was no reason to connect to classmates.  If they would have asked, they'd say, "Hey, do you want to study with us for a few hours?"  And I'd look at them funny, wondering, "So… what would you be doing for those few hours?"  And they'd pull out multiple notebooks full of detailed notes and well-organized sections and neatly highlighted key points, and books with all the important pages marked, and sections underlined for emphasis.  And I'd pull out a notebook with a half a page of seemingly unorganized scribbling.  And they'd pull out old tests, with 80% written at the top.  And I'd pull out an old test, with 98% written at the top.  And then I'd put it back, asking them, mentally, "Do you really want to know the truth?" and walk off sighing.  Because, I think you might be better off not knowing.  Because I don't think, I - don't - think, this knowledge would make you feel any better about yourself.  So if you want me to help you, well, I can do that, but, if you want me to study or do homework with you, well… I don't know about that.
No one ever knew really.
No one ever knew, and even that was part of the problem.  The professor says, "You did really well.  You must have worked really hard," and I think back laughing, wondering if I was supposed to say, "No, it's just that your class, and school in general, is a complete joke to me."  Anyone that knew I scored well on all the tests would think, "Wow, that guy must study a lot."  Yeah.  You would think.  And everyone out there, everyone out there, is saying, "You did great.  You showed you learned a lot, and you surely worked hard, so how could you be dissatisfied with that?"  Well…  Well……
It's like if I was so tall I could reach 10 feet up in the air, and they were teaching how to dunk.  And everyone's impressed I can dunk a basketball on a 10-foot tall rim.  But I can… reach 10 feet up.  I didn't do anything!  And they wonder why you're not happy when you can do so well.  But I didn't do anything!  I'm sure, I'm sure there are people who would be happy just standing there dunking on a 10-foot rim all day, or maybe even, maybe there aren't that many people that wouldn't be happy with that.  But you could look at all the people who can reach 8 feet and jump 2 and think, "Well if I could jump 2 feet, I could reach 12 feet up."  If I aimed even higher than that 10-foot rim everyone else thought was so great, I could do even more.
Of course if you were really tall, it'd be immediately obvious.  As for a level of understanding, or speed of understanding, or memory or logic, none of those are visible.  So the world, a world that can't evaluate those characteristics easily, looks and says, "You surely worked hard.  You surely learned a lot."  But I look back, and… I really don't know.  I think my brain was almost idle, or simply auto piloting when I was in classes or doing schoolwork, and then I usually tried to put it to work outside of class.
And then I got degrees, and everyone, everyone who doesn't know, will look and say that that is the measure of how much you know.  That shows how much you've learned, and how strong your ability is.  Because you've got to go to school to know any of that, to learn any of that.  Because when you're in school, you're studying, learning, and working hard.  Yeah.  But there are always exceptions.
And I couldn't- I couldn't make that my meaning for school.  Sure it has its value, but I couldn't accept it as my own answer.  The whole idea that you go through a program and now the whole world thinks you're smart.  It felt like I could either do it just so that people would think that I was smart and qualified, or I could actually try to learn more and improve myself.  I could actually try to improve, or I could go along with the game of society while taking advantage of all their misconceptions.  And that wasn't my goal.
The waves of why's come crashing in again, and even though I can answer them in many different ways, I can't do so in a way that matters to me.  And so they keep on coming.  The waves of regret.  Doubt.  Dissatisfaction.  Disappointment.  They would say that's ridiculous for one who did so well, but it's so hard to make the other lines of reasoning mean anything to me.  And so, even now, the question just keeps coming back, in all it's varieties.  Why didn't you do more?  Why didn't you change something?  Why didn't you find a different answer?  If you didn't care then why'd you go through it?  Why did you do it?
Why?

Why?



Why?

The Turkey Trot 2013

There was never really any point to it, you know.  Even if I ran, say, 18:56 for my 5K time, even then...  I wasn't aiming to become a runner again, and there's no award for being good but not great, and there was no way, nooo waaay that I could run that fast anyway.  So it's a story of: no matter how hard you try, no matter how much effort you put in, you will not be able to produce a worthwhile result.  So why even try at all?

And that was one interpretation of it.  I couldn't overlook that, but I could always focus on an alternate view.  You could see anything and everything as meaningless, always asking why.  Why would you do something like that?  Why would you care about something like that?  Surely there's no point to it.  You could always look at things from that perspective.  But I didn't run to tell a story of how pointless it all was.  This time, this time it will be a story of overcoming the past, I said.  I'll show the world that you are not bound by your weaknesses!  And with that, I set off on another foolhardy journey...

Dual n-backing, and, my fluid intelligence seems to be off the charts

So having gone through all that intelligence stuff and hearing about this big news that apparently the dual n-back game increases fluid intelligence, I decided I might as well try out an n-back game myself.  In an n-back game, you are presented with a sequence of objects (numbers, letters, sounds, etc) and you press something if the next object you are shown matches the one that was n objects ago.  So, if you were doing a 1-back game you would just be pressing the button if the object you were shown matches the one immediately before it, and if you were doing, say, a 3-back game you would press the button if the object matches the one from 3 ago (like A, B, C, A, the last A matches the letter from 3 times back so you would press the button).  Now it's a dual n-back game when you have to memorize 2 streams of objects at once (which I didn't know at first, so I just made a single n-back game).  I made my rough calculator version in about 10 minutes with 5 speed options and your choice of n and how many digits to use.  I played it a few times on low n levels, figured that was too easy and jumped to 7-back and struggled with that a little (if it was slow enough I could do it well but if it was very fast it got tough).  Then it started to bug me about how much was lacking from this TI-83 game created in 10 minutes, and I looked for a better version online.  I found this, and I downloaded it, started it up, and went with the default settings.  Here are the results from my first 20 tries:

The way it works is you advance a level if you score 80% or above and you drop a level if you score 50% or below three times without advancing.  D is for dual and the number in the middle is the n-back level, so D3B is dual 3-back.  I expect that this is pretty good for a first 20, which is why I had to be fair and mention the single n-back practice I had on my calculator.  I didn't do all 20 at once, I did about 5 or 6 and then did other stuff and then did it again later.  Also I cheated and quit in the middle a couple rounds when I missed a bunch at the start (osu! reflex), but it was after I had already done a few on D3B, and I only quit 2 or 3 times.

Then, I saw the FAQ and the discussions and the current research and all of that, all about the dual n-back game, and I realized that some people were taking this very seriously.  There were studies that had been done recently, and people who put a lot of time and effort into training on the dual n-back.  For me though, I couldn't help but feel that... it was just another game.