Very cool 3D Dual N-back

[Fredo Corleone]

Hi guys I've made this after a lil while because I was sick of the ugliness of other Dual N-back games.

It's a 3D cube with faces that light up, you can play with the scene by rotating it with you mouse or touch.

This is plain HTML, CSS and JS. If you want to steal the code then do it, just remember to credit me with @FredoCorleone.

https://codepen.io/eternalsunshineofspotlessmind/full/vYZBLyX

[Fredo Corleone]

By the way if you want the mobile capable application (that you can add to the home of your smartphone as an app)

https://4skinskywalker.github.io/3D-Dual_N-back/

[Leonardo]

Is there any way to play the old one? I liked it better. It is possible to download the old one as an .exe?

[Fredo Corleone]

Sure.

These are the new links:
3D DNB old

3D DNB new

[Leonardo]

Thank you. I really love that game. I wish I wasn't as coding illiterate as I am. I admire your work. 

[William]

Thank you for this I really like your 3D DNB old version with rotation off. Thank you!

[Leonardo]

The reason why Brain Workshop, despite the absence of 3D elements is still the best option is the abundance of choice that it offers. I play penta-4-variable-back on it, which is something that no other program allows me to do. 

If you were willing to add those options, in part by merging the new and old concepts, a 3x3x3 cube where you can activate double audio, numbers in one ear and letters in the other, colors, shapes, position and variability, you would have the perfect N-Back software out there.

For example, I feel that it is much more interesting illuminating faces of the individual cubes than the cubes themselves, and with the 3x3x3 you would have 162 faces to illuminate, if my mental math is correct, and you would be able to project in them shapes like stars, circles and whatnot, in any color that you like, with the added benefit of rotation, if wanted, forcing you to develop a mental map to keep the insanely hard tracking. 

That training would be absolutely fucking nuts and a blast. And I assume that you can take a lot from Brain Workshop. The good things about being able to track that many kind of complex stimulus simultaneously is that it resembles life a lot, whereas regular Dual-n-Back resembles nothing, and that is why I think that it offers less than optimal transference. Also, the more complex and customizable, the funniest and easiest to keep engaged.  

[Leonardo]

Some old captures that I have already posted here:

https://i.postimg.cc/qqtkvphR/image.png

https://i.postimg.cc/dQnd767c/image.png

[Leonardo]

You can even add "patterns". If you spot a "loop" that has repeated perfectly at least once. 

[Leonardo]

The good things about patterns is that they emerge as a relational quality. That kind of training would closely resemble daily experience. An over-saturation of stimuli that you need to make sense of and recognize patterns from to be able to navigate the world intelligently, that would, I am sure, have deep transfer effects. 

Man, I wish my coding abilities were not that restricted. I should have studied programming instead of linguistics. 

[Leonardo]

My mental math is obviously incorrect, because I was not thinking that faces that touch each other are imposible to distinguish. But that can be solved by spacing a little bit the cubes. And you may add or subtract cubes in the settings. That would be highly interesting. 

[Leonardo]

The thing about patterns is that it can be asked after the game ends. For example, any game has a number of patters that you can determine. Like, for example, if you select 2 patterns in the options, colours go: "red red yellow red green" during that game and audio goes: "M T X Q Q". 

Then, at the end of the game you are asked: What patterns were there?

And you have to select Colors: because one of the patters was colors, and Audio, for the same reason, but no Position, for example, and you have to fill the patterns that were there in both categories. 

The length of the pattern may be that of the N level that you are in, or it may be dissociated, I don't know what is best. Probably a pattern of length 3 would be too easy, whereas Penta-3-Back is insanely difficult. So maybe the length of the patterns can be determined in settings by choosing what numeral do you want to add, or subtract, to N. Like, an N+3 pattern length would provide you a 6 item pattern when in Penta-3-Back.

That would be an insane relational activity. Would force you to memorize, for the N-Back part, and to comprehend for the spotting patterns part. That is just how understanding any matter in real life actually works. That training would surely lead you to live a smarter existence. 

[Leonardo]

Pattern length can also be made variable, so you are not expecting a concrete length, and you can determine the maximal length in settings, being the lowest length N. Also, patterns can be asked on reverse, as Brain Workshop has a reverse mode. 

So, with the variable N, where you also select the maximum level. Variable-penta-4-back means that you can be asked:

To relate to the previous position.

To relate to two positions before.

To relate to three positions before.

To relate to four positions before.

And you may have, for example, three patterns:

One of maximal length. 

One that should be introduced on reverse.

One of N length. 

Imagine the headache! Hahaha. That would be so fucking, godly nice and unbelievable. 

[Leonardo]

The number of patterns can also be determined by + or - N.

I really struggle to find any mental training that it is truly stimulating and capable to provide some transfer. I think that this community is in dire need of trainings aimed to +140 IQ individuals. 

[Fredo Corleone]

To be honest I don't see how increasing the amount of inputs per sense is any better than keeping it simple and just increasing N.

Dual N-back is for me the best because it's really working with minimum task shifting requirements both our working memories (phonological loop and visuospatial scratchpad).

If I could I would add smell, taste and vibration (to include other senses).

Well I could add vibration on the phone...

I don't think that something as simple to a stimulus that matches with N stimuli before can be considered a legit relational training, I'm mostly sure it's not. I don't even consider syllogisms tremendously good in relational training.

[Leonardo]

The relational part is the identification of patterns, mostly. The cool thing about multiple stimuli is that you develop some kind of synesthesia to it. Which is favourable in its own, as you may have read in this sub.

Compared to a control group who carried out the IQ test twice, 9 weeks apart without any training, and whose IQ remained the same, participants who undertook the synesthesia training regime increased their IQ on a fluid intelligence test by an average of 12 points.

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4235407/

For example.

Left: 4. Right: K. Image: Circle. Colour: Red. Position: Up-Left. 

I imagine 4 black cats (for me, 4 is a "n" and "n" is a black cat) with keys on their necklaces being submerged on a lava pit in the up-left. This is the only way to play Penta-Variable-4-back at the speeds I play it. When you have to form and interact with that complex scenarios inside your head, you develop a speed, a creativity and a comprehension that are far beyond your baseline.

The 3D part would allow me to be much better at drawing, for example. 

This study showed that the combination of MT and 3D-MOT contributed for a better cognitive performance in the EG. Thus, the results of the present study encourage further research and the development of combined cognitive interventions for the elderly population with and without cognitive deficits.

https://www.scielo.br/j/dn/a/8bKjPWPy8BYQLrTKJ8r7pQk/?lang=en

The pattern thing, would allow me to get better at recognizing rules, which is like extracting the gist of a material. 

After training, the gist reasoning group (n = 10) exhibited significant improvement in ability to abstract meanings and increased fact recall. This group also showed significant generalizations to untrained executive functions of working memory and inhibition. 

https://www.frontiersin.org/articles/10.3389/fneur.2014.00087/full

You may create a lot of difficult patterns governing the game that you have then to extract.

[Leonardo]

A recent example of my enhanced creativity due to training in visualizing and relating things. 

[Leonardo]

What do you consider good relational training?

I think that the use of arguments whose relationships are dependant on logic gates are the hardest and the best. There is no software for that, so I "play" it with a pen and a sheet. I more or less described it previously in the other thread. 

I was able to do Dual-9-Back with not much effort, and I never obtained any benefit from it. Research has shown that the benefits are not always present. I think that we should be more ambitious and construct a better training to really improve our minds. 

What is your IQ, if it is ok to ask such a question?

[Leonardo]

Even if you like Dual-n-Back, I recommend you to try the variable option, it forces you to relate and comprehend much more deeply. It is way harder that way. And harder is good!

[성문규]

Leonardo, I’m not sure if I really get everything you’re saying. But I definitely agree that more sophisticated training games are needed, or at least that we need a more robust discussion of what makes a good training game.

Imo good relational training or brain training in general makes full use of a variety of parameters to improve working memory, and requires progressively more complicated computations/logical manipulations to occur at very fast speeds or even be partially automatic. Preferably, the ability of automating certain tasks, by practice/habit, that could potentially prove useful in any cognitively demanding real life task, should be targeted.

For example, recognition of complicated abstract patterns without consciously going through everything to draw commonalities could be the result of automatic computations that happen very quickly. Regarding this, I think visual schemas could be the abstract commonalities that could be the “patterns” between different images. Perhaps the practice of extracting common visual schemas from a collection of images could prove useful.

Michael Nielsen’s article Thought As A Technology, I think was the title, has a good description of how this works. A very simple concrete example would be the similarity of shape of a heart icon and a single butterfly wing. Both share the heart-like shape.

Another example of a very versatile and useful ability would be the quick formation of a scene/combination of images that could serve as associative anchors to link certain bits of information to, for enhancement of later of recall. Leonardo, according to your comments, I think you make great use of this ability to enhance your performance in a variety of training games. If you find yourself using this to such a similarly great advantage when studying some cognitively demanding subject, please let us know how you managed to develop this skill to such an extent.

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[Leonardo]

Yes, I do apply those techniques when I am creating or studying, but I still feel that there is a gap between where current trainings can help you reach and what it would be the minimum necessary to have a full impact in your real life.

Silogismos by Robert has been the best training I have ever done in my entire life. I focused separately both on depth, by playing with 99 silogismos shown and memorized one by one with manual mode, and on speed, by doing only 10, but showing any single one of them for no more than half a second with the timed option. The impact in my way of thinking and visualizing has been profound, but it still does not present enough steps and relationships so that you can apply the same principles of visualizing easily when you are reading, for example, about Gödel Theorems or heavy Semantics stuff, so it does not let you reach yet the level of a genius, but I think that it may if we improve the trainings.

I don't know why people is so afraid. I do juggling, and the most interesting part about it is conquering a new trick that seemed impossible at first. Any good mental training must seem impossible, that is the evidence that you have really improve. People don't want to struggle when training, they want to see gradual improvements, from dual-2-back to dual-3-back. That cannot have a qualitative impact, only a quantitative one. And there won't be real-life situations in which everything is so easy and clear, so you will panic and you wont be able to apply your techniques under pressure. 

Penta-variable-back more closely resembles human experience. Since you may be asked to go back any number of times to recall five different kind of stimuli. It is still not good enough, and that is why I would kill for an improvement on it with 3D elements and so on, but it is closer to what you will need. 

The cool thing about Boolean logic, and why I am so obsessed in integrating it, is that, in a way, are the basics patterns that govern thought, and it makes you create a lot of same-opposite relationships that are being refreshed constantly. My issue with standard training is that it does not have enough layers compared with any hard book or situation you may be trying to comprehend. 

Visualizing 99 silogismos is orders of magnitude easier than writing a page of Infine Jest. Playing penta-variable-4-back is laughably easier than making a work of imagination like the ones of Kim Jung Gi. What are we really trying to achieve? Mediocrity? We must try to shoot for the star. We may fail. We will probably fail. But shooting for gaining a miserable level of Dual-n-back is impossible to work. 

The standard training may bring you from under average to average, or from average to slightly above. But it is of no use for people that it is already well above average and want to reach levels of geniality. 

[성문규]

Regarding the use of various parameters to stretch working memory: in N-back, we usually get very small bits/instances of information as separate “pieces” to maintain in working memory. Whether it be a single color, a single letter, or a single tile position in a simple 3x3 grid, it’s obvious that most variations of N-back use small individual “pieces”.

But what if we’re shown a collection of 4 7x7 grids, each of which has 5 tiles that are colored, all in a unique configuration? This gives us larger chunks to work with, and with increased complexity given the 7x7 grid, compared to the 3x3 used in position N-back, I think it can also be used to create images that remind us of certain objects.

In fact, I’d be quite certain that it’s much easier to memorize 3 7x7 grids of 5 colored tiles oriented close together, compared to 15 individual colored tiles on a 7x7 grid shown one at a time at random. Probably because it’s much easier to encode chunks in the former, as it’s just given.

And yet isn’t the former better attuned to real life? We usually take mental snapshots or think in images when solving complicated problems. Few situations would require the recall of a series of very simple individual bits of information that have no inherent reason to chunk together into something that remotely resembles a pre-existing schema.

So I think we should experiment with the size of the “pieces” presented in series to the player, as well.

[Leonardo]

The interesting thing, in my opinion, is precisely that. To experiment with multiple factors. We are, in a way, pioneers of mental training. We can be walking through unknown avenues. Getting satisfied with putting a single foot outside of our homes is crazy.

[itrn...@gmail.com]

Leonardo, how exactly has silogismos impacted your thinking, other than having you habitualize forming creative associative scenes/images to anchor relational memory to? Why do you think speed is so important? 

[Fredo Corleone]

I consider a good relational training certain classes of aptitude tests, those that have frame of reference embedded into them (for example boats and river (I think it was the name of the category haha)).

I was able to go beyond Dual-9-back and the pleasant side effects were tremendously lucid dreams. That's my main focus when I'm training my brain, to train in such a way to increase my average awereness, to experience lucid dreams in the end.

As you asked my IQ I've not taken too many tests, I'm ranging from 120 to 140 on matrices. I try to refrain from doing those and I only take 1 test a year or so to not get accostumed to them.

[Fredo Corleone]

Leonardo if you want we can have a call on Discord or Google Meet and start working on a game togheter, or at least discuss the foundations of the gameplay. Just drop me your handle on Discord and I'll message you there. For me it's way better to have a call, which is far more interactive than a bunch of messages scatterad around.

By the way I was thinking about a game based on logic gates too, but I wanted it to be something out of the ordinary.

Lately I've been thinking about the importance of context in the natural languages and if, and how, it's possible to make a game that deals with that kind of things. Such as some game in which context is what makes up the meaning of certain relations and make the user think hard to grasp how things are behaving based on the context. But it would look like a sort of exploration-puzzle with given rules, not really the average brain training app.

[Leonardo]

Yes, my username is "edefakiel", but my English is really poor. I don't now whether I would be able to competently communicate orally. 

To summarize here, I believe that there are multiple projects that can be tackled independently and are maybe not that hard to understand:

 A 3D N-Back where:

- You can use variability. "Each trial, a random n-back level will be used".

- You can add up to five stimuli. Left sound, Right sound. Color. Image. Position. 

- For position you can use any side of the object. 

- Both the camera and the object rotate, to force you to better keep the image in your head.

- You are not limited to cubes, but you can load other polyhedrons, or even irregular more complex objects (a 3D rendition of a face with planes?). 

- You are not limited to just one object, I don't really know if that would be feasible or interesting, and them should rotate independently. 

A Sillogimous where:

- You have more than two premises.

A Pattern Recognizing game inspired by the game 7 Billion Humans:

- You see a pattern of objects moving, illuminating or whatever and you have to write the rule or rules that control their actions. 

- For example, a dot is first red and it blinks once and then green and blinks twice: If red then blink once; else: twice. Or something similar that is more feasible and makes more sense, I know little about programming. The interesting part is the ability to get the gist of complex patterns governed by multiple laws. 

- The software may ask for every single set of rules that would produce that outcome. That would melt your brain and force you to think outside of the box.

A Boolean game like Make It True for Android but with 3D elements:

- Imagine having the inputs at the bottom of a cube (or any other polyhedron) and having the gates interacting with each other and sprawling over all faces. Forcing you to careful map mentally the whole thing before introducing the input to achieve a Truth output at the top of it. You can even link multiple objects, or regulate the size of the objects for an optimal tortured state. 

A Silogismos by Robert, but improved in several aspects:

- For example, there was a good in theory option there: you could link several objects together. 

Águila-Toro-Canica is more than Zorro-Mochila-Libro

But in practice you could just memorize the first word. 

Also, most words were concrete things, instead of more abstract concepts, and objects instead of verbs. 

Imagine the alternative:

Eagle-Fly-Happiness is less that Eagle-Fly-Love

Eagle-Swim-Love is more than Eagle-Fly-Happiness. 

That would be though after a while if they are presented one by one. You would need to create very complex images in your brain.

- Another shortcoming of Silogismos was the separation of more-less relations with equal-opposite relations, an optimal system would combine the two. 

Eagle is the opposite of less if Car is more that Turtle. 

Car is less than Turtle. 

Then, Eagle is the same as Car. 

[Leonardo]

Your idea for a game sounds delightful. It reminds me of Recursed. Which you may like. 

El miércoles, 1 de septiembre de 2021 a las 14:14:33 UTC+2, stopchemt...@gmail.com escribió:

[Fredo Corleone]

Hi Leo I also need your code (after the #) to add you in Discord...

[Leonardo]

Sorry, I have barely used it:

1366

[성문규]

i might be able to join add me too: itrn7#7927

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[Fredo Corleone]

I've sent you the request ;)

Please send me a message when you've accepted so that I see you (because I'm bloated with "friends").