Are you smarter than Ayumu the chimp?

Last month Ayumu and five other chimpanzees made the news because of their outstanding cognitive performance. They even beat out college students in their tests. The results of the study was reported in Current Biology, “Working memory of numerals in chimpanzees.”

If you don’t believe me check out the video of Ayumu rocking the test:

Very impressive performance. Luminosity Games has remade Ayumu’s game. If you wanna try to see if you’re any better than Ayumu, give it a shot here. I’m not very good at the game.

18 thoughts on “Are you smarter than Ayumu the chimp?

    1. actually i have played this game, the real full test for ayumu gave a sighting of the digits for just 60milliseconds, humans can’t even see the digits, let alone place them in numerical order.

  1. yea, the game is very easy
    But you are not some sort of genius if you can score great. I average a 10 game so why am I here?

  2. Most of the time I scored 2 or 3. I know why I’m here and not in Japan showing off.

  3. It seems a lot of this has to do with repetitive training, not exclusively memory. When a human just looks at this test, at the speed it shows on lumosity, it is hard for most individuals, which is why the study showed human performance worsened as they were given less time to see the numbers (and the young chimp scores did not). But when Ayumu first trained for the game, he did not start at that level. First, he just touched the numbers in order on the screen (without the boxes covering them up), then eventually, he moved to doing it from memory, but he’d already trained in the speed of just touching numbers in order (memory or no). Then gradually, they decreased the amount of time they show the numbers, making it harder and harder. And I think he spent hours doing this, and of course, received food every time he did it right. Most humans don’t typically train like that, and the college students in the study were probably doing it for psych credit or something–and probably had not spent any time training for this (much less 5+ years of their lives training for this).

    That said, it is certainly possible that chimps have a better ability to take a mental picture and process it at that speed than humans do. But it would be hard to tell with a test like that, since the chimps trained so much. Interesting and very impressive nonetheless.

  4. The test is really evaluating our ability to quiet our inner voice long enough to focus on the numbers in order to remember their order. Chimps aren’t worrying about unpaid bills and such like humans are. For the same reason a typical 4 year old child could beat most adults in a similar memory game.

    If an adult can shut their inner voice up long enough to do well in this game they have a neat parlor trick to show their friends. But, if the same adult normally doesn’t have an inner voice they don’t have a stable self-identity nor are they able to spot opportunities of interest to them nearly as well as would be someone focused on such opportunities.

  5. Make sure you’re comparing apples to apples on this one. The game on the website only has 5 numbers shown… Ayumu’s game has 9. That’s a big difference in difficulty for such a game.

  6. i played the game that the chimps doing at its really amazing and takes a long time to beat him. ive gotten 10/10…beat that! =)

  7. who ever played the game at lumiosity and score 10/10 and thinks you beat the chimp… you are a retard because the game at lumiosity only require 5 digit. In the video ayumu play the same game with 9 digit, 4 digit difference.

    1. in the video he also has a lot longer to look at the numbers, and theyre not covered up until he touches the first number sooo he can never be wrong on the first number

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