Anticipation Test
Stop the ball on the line. Eight runs at changing speeds: the average miss is your score.
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Bar widths show roughly how many people land in each band on the provisional curve. Eight runs at four speeds, each speed twice: one lucky stop can happen, eight cannot.
What moves it
Speed. The faster the ball, the less time to read where it will be, and the same hesitation costs more distance. The four speeds are the same for everyone, so the number compares players, not luck.
Your lean. Most people stop a fast ball a touch late and a slow one a touch early. The lean under your score says which way you err; a big lean with a small spread is a habit, and habits can be trained.
Your hardware. The ball you see is where it was a frame ago, and your tap takes a few milliseconds to arrive, so every stop reads a little late on a slow screen. Compare yourself to yourself on the same setup.
What this measures
Anticipation is timing a response to meet a moving thing exactly when it arrives: a serve returned, a merge into traffic, a glass caught off the edge of a table. Sports science calls it coincidence-anticipation timing, and it is not reaction time: you are not answering a signal that happened, you are predicting one that is about to, so the limit is not nerve speed but how well you read motion against time.
The ball approaches the line at four speeds, each used twice, in a shuffled order, with two practice runs before the eight that count. You tap to stop it; the miss, in milliseconds early or late, is the run's result, and the average of the eight absolute misses is your score. The shuffle is the point: a single speed becomes a rhythm within three runs, and a rhythm can be tapped with your eyes closed. Changing speeds force you to actually watch.
Under the score, the card reports your lean, early or late, because a consistent lean is a habit, and habits respond to training in a way raw nerve speed does not. The starting curve is an assumption from what lab timers report plus a browser's lag, declared as such on the Method page along with the count of measured runs.
Questions people ask
Reaction time is answering a signal after it appears. Anticipation is acting so that your move lands together with something you can see coming: a ball, a beat, a car pulling out. Sports science calls it coincidence-anticipation timing and measures it exactly like this: a light runs down a track, you press when it reaches the end, and the miss in milliseconds is the score.
A single speed turns into a rhythm in three runs: count, tap, no watching required. Four speeds, each twice, in a shuffled order, mean you have to track the ball every time. Every player gets the same four speeds, so the average miss compares players and not the draw.
On the provisional curve, 55 ms is the middle and under 30 ms is sharp. Lab timers put adults at a few tens of milliseconds at moderate speeds; a browser adds its screen and input lag on top, which is why the number here is declared provisional until humanlag has its own runs, where everyone plays in one pool.
Because they count different things. A reaction time is a whole journey, signal to muscle, with a floor around 200 ms. An anticipation miss is only the error in a forecast you had the ball's whole approach to prepare: the movement was planned in advance, and the only question was when to release it. Landing 40 ms off the line does not mean you moved in 40 ms; it means your forecast was 40 ms wrong.
It starts as an assumption worth 300 runs, shaped from published norms, and every run played here adds one to it, everyone in one pool. The Method page says which norms, how the percentile is read, and how many runs this test has measured so far.