What is the 1 second challenge?
You start a stopwatch with one press and stop it with a second press, aiming for exactly 1.000 seconds. The stopwatch runs on screen, to the thousandth of a second. You get 5 tries, and your score is how far you were from one second on average, in milliseconds. Lower is better; 0 would be perfect every time.
How to play it here
Press Get ready, then press Space or tap anywhere in the box to start the stopwatch, and press again to stop it. After each try you see your exact time and how many milliseconds early or late you were, and the next try is ready a moment later.
How is your result calculated?
Each try is the time between your two presses, taken from the timestamps your browser gives each key press or touch the moment it arrives. Your result is the average distance from 1,000 milliseconds over your 5 tries, counting early and late misses alike. You also see your closest try and your tendency: whether, on average, you stopped early or late.
Because both ends of every try are your own presses, any fixed delay in your keyboard or touchscreen is in both of them and cancels out. That makes this one of the few timing results that is fairly comparable between devices, as long as you press the same way each time.
Why can't you just watch the numbers?
Because by the time you see 0.98 and decide to press, the second is over. Reacting to something you see takes a fraction of a second, far longer than the last moments of the count. So you can't react to the display: you have to predict when one second will be up and press in time with that prediction, the way a musician comes in on the beat. The running numbers mostly help you learn the rhythm between tries.
The display also can't show every millisecond: a screen redraws a fixed number of times a second, so the last digits jump rather than count. Your time doesn't depend on that, because it comes from your presses, not from what was on the screen.
How to get closer to one second
- Feel the rhythm. Counting "one-thousand" in your head is a classic way to time a second.
- Use your tendency. If you are usually late, start letting go of the press a little sooner.
- Keep your finger ready. Resting on the key or the screen between presses removes the time it takes to reach.
This is a timing game, not an assessment of anything. For a longer stretch with no numbers to watch, try the Time Perception Test; to react to a signal instead of predicting it, the Reaction Time Test.