Timed is a daily time estimation game with no clock
You are asked for an interval, 4.3 seconds say. You press and hold, and the screen goes dark: no clock, no counter, no ticking, nothing that moves at a fixed rate. You let go when you think the time is up. Counting in your head is allowed and, since the targets never land on a whole second, never quite enough. The game is in the feel of a duration, not the arithmetic.
Each hold is scored on how close it came to the interval asked for, in proportion, so the long intervals are as fair as the short ones. Five intervals a day, one hold each, the same five for everyone.
Why your sense of time drifts
Judgements of time are pulled toward the middle. Short intervals tend to feel longer than they are, long intervals shorter, and somewhere in between sits an interval people judge accurately. The pattern is called Vierordt's law, after Karl von Vierordt, who first recorded it in 1868. Timed lets you find out where your own accurate zone is.
How to estimate time without a clock
- Count steady beats with a word that takes about a second to say, such as “one Mississippi”.
- Count the whole seconds, then judge the leftover fraction by feel, because targets never land on a whole second.
- Keep the beat even from the first second to the last.
Questions
- How do you estimate time without a clock?
- Count steady one-second beats, then add the leftover fraction by feel. Timed targets such as 4.3 seconds are chosen so counting alone is never quite enough.
- Is counting in your head allowed?
- Yes. The challenge is the part of the interval that counting can't measure.
- What is Vierordt's law?
- It is the tendency to overestimate short intervals and underestimate long ones, first described by Karl von Vierordt in 1868.
- How is Timed scored?
- In proportion to the interval asked for, so a long hold is judged as fairly as a short one.
Timed is one of the free daily estimation games on Freehand. The others: Halved, cut it in half game; Dropped, projectile game; Angled, angle game; Counted, guess how many game; and Balanced, center of mass game.