Perfection

[Some thoughts that seem like they ought to be more related...]

Habits are supposed to be things we do smoothly, seemlessly and generally without error. But we still aren't perfect at them. We stumble on the stairs sometimes or drop our keys when opening the house or car door for no apparent reason. Should we be impressed at how good our habit system is or annoyed about these failures and non-perfections?

Tap Tap Revenge 3 is a sequence learning rhythm game that is structurally like Guitar Hero on the iPhone (or video iPod) except you tap on the screen for your responses. This makes is a lot like our lab task, SISL (for Serial Interception Sequence Learning). So, of course, I'm doing an introspective research experiment on long-term learning in TTR3.

I'm pretty accurate in Medium level difficulty mode. The %hit number at the end of any given song is usually 99% or 100% (often by rounding). I started getting an occasional "Full Clear" (FC) recently. This is an achievement you get if you make zero errors of any type for an entire song of 500-600 notes -- perfection!

What're the odds? Well, if you are 99.0% accurate, the odds of making 600 errorless responses in a row is... 0.2%, about 1:400. Pretty grim. At 99.5% accurate, you get up to around 5% (1:20). Practically speaking, it's more complicated since your accuracy is higher for songs you know (and I know I tend to play songs more when I like the song and can't promise I like easier songs better because, well, dopamine). Also, it's not totally clear how many error chances there are. Most of the "errors" I make now aren't missing or mis-timing a planned response, but accidentally double responding (or making n+1 responses to an n-response train, particularly for n's > 5) or accidentally dragging a finger on the screen when I don't mean to.

On Hard mode, my %hit score is typically down around 97%-98% rate, which seems pretty good but you can tell intuitively that you have no chance at all of a FC even without doing the odds on a calculator.

What's the point? Well, perfection is hard. And your habit learning system has to be pretty sharp to get you anywhere near perfection in the first place. I didn't download the TTR3 app that long ago, nor do I have that much time to practice, but my cortico-striatal circuits seem to be getting a pretty firm grip on the sequences.

I'm not even sure it's a good idea to dwell on how hard it is to achieve perfection, but the unnerving example I throw out sometimes is "how hard do you think it is to land an airplane?" Cause it seems like it's hard, but 10,000 planes land every day with virtually no incidents. There's a lot of 9's in that reliability rate. How do they do that? Doesn't it ever get boring or anybody lose focus? Either not or there are enough oversight systems to compensate, I guess. Or maybe flying an airplane isn't as hard as playing TTR3?