How the chimp test works
Numbered squares appear at random places on the board, starting with four of them. Tap them in order from 1 upward. The moment you tap 1, every other square is covered and you have to finish the sequence from memory.
Clear the board and the next one has one more number. A wrong tap is a strike and the board resets with a new layout at the same size. Three strikes end the test. Your score is the largest board you cleared.
What is a good chimp test score?
| Most numbers cleared | Rating |
|---|---|
| 14 or more | Exceptional |
| 11 to 13 | Strong |
| 9 to 10 | Above average |
| 7 to 8 | Average |
| 5 to 6 | Below average |
| Under 5 | Keep practicing |
The study that made this test famous
In 2007, Sana Inoue and Tetsuro Matsuzawa at Kyoto University’s Primate Research Institute published a short paper in the journal Current Biology. They had taught several chimpanzees the numerals 1 to 9 and then gave them a memory task. The numerals appeared scattered on a touchscreen, and as soon as the first one was touched, the rest turned into blank white squares. The chimp had to touch the squares in the right order.
A young chimpanzee named Ayumu turned out to be remarkably good at it. In a second version of the task, five numerals were flashed for a fraction of a second before being masked. When the display time was cut to about 210 milliseconds, too short to move your eyes around the screen, Ayumu still got around 80 percent of trials right. The university students tested on the same task dropped to roughly 40 percent.
Matsuzawa suggested that young chimpanzees may have something like photographic memory for a scene, an ability that humans might have traded away as language developed.
Does that mean chimps are smarter?
Not quite. Ayumu had done the task thousands of times, while the students were close to beginners. When later researchers gave human volunteers long practice on the same task, some of them reached Ayumu’s level of accuracy. So the result says more about what intense practice and a specialized skill can do than about general intelligence.
It is still a striking finding. On one narrow task, grabbing a whole pattern in a glance, a young chimp outperformed adult humans who had spent their lives reading numbers.
How this version differs from the lab task
In the Kyoto experiments the hardest condition limited how long you could look. Here you can study the board for as long as you like before tapping 1, and the challenge comes from the growing count of numbers instead. That makes it a test of how much you can store, not how fast you can take a snapshot.
If you want something closer to the original, give yourself a rule: tap 1 within two seconds of the board appearing.
Tips for a higher score
Study before the first tap. The clock is not running. Walk the path from 1 to the last number with your eyes until it feels like a single route.
Group neighbors. Numbers that sit close together can be stored as one cluster: “3 and 4 are the pair in the top left”.
Remember the shape of the path. A zigzag, a loop, a line across the top. Shapes are easier to hold than a list of separate positions.
Use your strikes wisely. A strike redraws the board at the same size, so a failed attempt still gives you practice at that level.
For a similar challenge without the numbers, try the visual memory test. For order without positions, the number memory test is the one to play.