About DailyRound

What this is

9 short tests of reaction speed, memory, typing and focus, built to be done in a couple of minutes and repeated. Eight measure one thing each. The ninth, the daily round, runs all eight and combines them into a single score for the day.

It exists because the individual tests are easy to find and the trend is almost impossible to. A single reaction time is noise. Thirty days of them is the only level at which any of this becomes informative, and that requires somewhere to keep them.

Why there is no account

Keeping a history normally means creating an account, which means an email address, a password, a database and a breach waiting to happen. None of that is necessary to store a list of numbers you generated yourself.

So every result lives in your browser's local storage instead. Nothing is uploaded and there is no server-side record. The cost is real and stated on every page: nothing syncs between devices, and clearing your browsing data deletes it. The export button produces a JSON file you can import elsewhere, which is the manual version of sync.

How scoring works

Each test converts to a figure out of 100 against a fixed reference range — reaction time from 500ms down to 150ms, typing from 15 to 110 words per minute, and so on. The daily score is the mean of those.

Fixed rather than a percentile against other players, deliberately. A percentile moves because of who else happened to play that day, which makes your own history meaningless as a record of you — and it would require the accounts and the server this site does not have. The honest description of the number is that it is your position on a scale we chose, not a rank.

What is deliberately missing

• Leaderboards. Global rankings on browser tests measure who is willing to cheat, and they require an identity to attach a rank to.
• Notifications and reminder emails. There is a streak because a reason to return is the point, but nothing that manufactures obligation.
• Sign-up walls. Every test is complete and unlimited without one.
• Difficulty that scales to flatter you. The reference ranges do not move to keep your score rising.

The limits, stated properly

These are consumer tests in a web browser and the measurement is genuinely imprecise. A 60Hz display adds up to 16 milliseconds before anything is drawn. A wireless mouse adds a few more. A touchscreen adds several times that. Added together, your equipment can account for 40 milliseconds or more before your nervous system is involved.

That is why every test compares you against your own history rather than a global table. The only fair comparison is you, yesterday, on the same machine.

And none of these is a diagnostic. Reaction time, digit span and Stroop tasks all appear in clinical work, with calibrated equipment and normative data a web page cannot supply. A poor score means a poor run. If you are worried about your memory or attention, that is a conversation for a doctor rather than a browser game.

How it is paid for

At the moment, it is not. The intention is display advertising later, kept off the test surfaces themselves and placed on results rather than in the middle of a run. If that changes anything about how your data is handled, the privacy and cookie pages will be updated before it happens rather than after.