In the YouTube Premium series Mind Field, Michael of Vsauce fame spent an episode (season 3, episode 1) diving into the cognitive tradeoff hypothesis. As part of this episode, he spoke with researchers who had trained a monkey named Ayumu in a number of memory tasks—and suggesting that the monkey would outperform humans. I wanted to give these tasks a try myself.

One such task was showing the numbers 1 through 9 on a touchscreen for about a half-second, then replacing the numbers with simple squares. The user then has to touch all nine squares in the order of the original numbers (without being able to see those numbers). My self-assigned project was to recreate this task (and maybe more—though those never came to fruition) in React.

The project took only a couple hours to complete, but it ended up being quite fun.

I had published the project online for a short period in 2019 but never linked to it anywhere. Now, the code just remains on GitHub, where it can be installed locally by anyone wishing to test these hypotheses themselves.