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.

Of the 4 games, Fluid Motion is my favorite.

Originally, there was going to be a scoring system that was meant to be similar across all games.  However, it quickly became clear that the games were very different and that didn't really make sense.  The idea of a coach was also created when the mindset was to create a single system across all games, but it also doesn't seem to make as much sense in most of the games.  I don't know what I'll do with the coach idea.

The Shuffle

The current scoring system is as follows: each combination of stats is given a point value according to my own rough estimation of difficulty, and the value is decreased for misses.  Your 3 best scores account evenly for 70% of your total, and your 3 most recent scores evenly make up the other 30%.  To score high, you'll want to get 3 very high scores, and then get 3 high scores in a row.  Before level 4, the majority of your score is determined by card count.  After level 4, the majority of your score is determined by shuffle difficulty.

On level 1, I've gotten 20/20 once, and 22/24 once.  I've played the shuffle levels some but don't have any results that are particularly memorable to me.  Even for me, the 4 card shuffle is really tough.

There was meant to be one more variation to the task where new cards appear and shuffle in with the old cards, and then some cards are removed, but it hasn't been implemented yet.  It would probably be worthwhile as it could require a new mental approach to tackling the task depending on how you manage the shuffling.

As for what strategy you should use, I believe any strategy (that doesn't involve cheating) is fine.  If you can find a mental strategy that is strong enough to allow you to do all the levels well, then it's probably a very useful strategy for memorizing shuffled information in general.

This is the only game to make use of coaches, but even in this game there's a lot more I would add.  When the coach takes into account difficulty, it usually only relies on card count, but at the higher levels I'd rather make it rely more on shuffle difficulty.

Smooth Moves

This game gives you an opportunity to practice your ability to memorize information in chunks.  If you can reach the higher levels, you'll find yourself able to recite 10, 15, 20 and possibly longer letter sequences.  This game is also supposed to share many ties with deductive reasoning and deductive style thinking: Memorize a rule and repeat the rule.  Memorize a situation and a corresponding rule and repeat the rule in the situation.

The limit is 30 moves and 30 dances.  I've reached all 30 moves but didn't pass (but I found out that there was a duplicate move included in the list), and 9 or 12 dances or something, ironically I can't remember as always.  Then I got exhausted partway through level 5 or so.  But, that was before I put a timer into the game, and I really took my time on that play through, so I'll have to go at it seriously again sometime.

There were meant to be a few more levels, but they haven't been made yet.  This game is one where I'd consider changing the level design, but I haven't thought of a better design yet.

General inductive reasoning stuff

The two inductive reasoning games are essentially puzzle games.  If you get stuck, it's okay to ask for help, but (if you want to improve) you don't want to ask for an answer or for an explanation of how the level works, you want to ask something like, "What approach would one take to find the answer to this puzzle?"  It is the way of thinking and tackling problems like these that you want to learn.

I very much believe that people who tend to only use deductive reasoning can still learn to think inductively, but, even if I'm wrong, people who think deductively can be taught rules and points to consider and probably accomplish the same thing anyway.  I'm planning on giving tips on how to think inductively here, so if you're stuck on the puzzles, you might want to stay tuned for that.

Rock Paper Scissors

You don't have to win every round!  I've made it more and more clear in the instructions, but inevitably I'm sure someone will go at it trying to win every round.  There's a rule behind how the computer makes it's choices, and sometimes the rule has the computer choosing randomly, so if there's some round that you can't seem to predict beforehand, it might be a round that you don't have to win.  The randomness becomes a difficult factor to deal with in the higher levels.  Also, some levels may be easier than you expect.

There are some levels where it's possible to win just by pressing a certain combination of buttons, and all levels can be cleared if you happen to get lucky with your presses.  There might be some good adjustments to the levels beyond what I've already done that would reduce these.  Of course, it goes against the goal of the game to clear levels like that, but the levels stay the same so you can go back to them.

Fluid Motion

As mentioned above, this game is my favorite of the four.  From what I've seen, it seems like very few people will struggle with level 1, and most people will get the first 2 parts of level 2, although depending on how good you are at it it could take a little time.  Level 2 part 3 is the one that many people will struggle with, so if you have a good understanding of that level, then you have a good way of thinking about the game.

I think it's a nice thing that you can get close and often pass levels just by pressing buttons as it makes the game more enjoyable to play even when you're struggling on, say, 2-3.  All of level 3 and all of level 4 are passable just by pressing buttons without actually figuring out a clear answer or reasoning.  I wouldn't say easy, but they're passable like that.  However, the final level of level 5 and all of level 6 (and most of the higher levels too of course) will most likely be near impossible if your strategy is to just press buttons and hope you end up going where you want to go.  So, although you could use this strategy, you'll really want to understand what the arrows do, and why they move you in the way they do.

Some of the parts of level 4 are actually easier to clear just by figuring out button combinations that work, and, since the movement isn't really used again, technically it's okay to clear the level that way.  I don't think the movement is too unreasonable to figure out though.

On level 5, the challenge is as much deductive reasoning as inductive reasoning.  I don't think this is necessarily a bad thing, but it is a thing.  The solutions can be a bit tricky…

Of the people who I've had test this game out, some of them could beat the whole thing so it's doable.  And sure, they're really smart people, but, hey, at least it's a known fact that the game is humanly possible…  They also showed me that the game wasn't hard enough, so I had to add harder levels, although they could probably pass those as well (10-3 and 10-4 are tough though, maybe even harder than most of level 11).  I'm sure there are other people out there too who could clear the whole game.