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Divergent Association Task: Fast creativity test
- fallingfrog 5y ago89.48 I felt myself chaining the words together, so I think it was still associative, but I skipped 3 or 4 until I found myself hopping to something that felt pretty different from the previous word.
- saltcured 5y agoI suppose I cheated since I read comments here before running the test. I tried to follow the rules and avoid technical terms, but cannot say whether I was primed by others posts... Your score is 91.32, higher than 97.69% of the people who have completed this task asteroid rhubarb dishwasher nomenclature virus philosopher plateau
- smitty1e 5y agoI suppose that I did relatively well. This is most interesting as a test as such. That is: how is it implemented? Getting too concerned about the results may be hasty.
- leakbang 5y agoThis FAQ by them is quite nice: https://www.datcreativity.com/faq https://www.datcreativity.com/faq
- necrotic_comp 5y agoUgh I over thought this and had a really basic word in the mix of my super silly sat vocab words - by my estimate this was different, but not by their metric.
- Tade0 5y agoMy score is better than average, but looking at the highest scoring sets they seem to not follow the rules, because they use specialised terms like "trichrome" or "pustule". I'm not a native English speaker, but I don't suppose the mentioned words are used in normal conversation.
- ALittleLight 5y agoPustule isn't a common word, unless you work in a medical context perhaps, but I'd expect a native speaker to know it.
- Kaibeezy 5y agoMy work group uses it all the time, but always preceded by “festering”.
- SemanticStrengh 5y ago
- jez 5y agoI kind of wish they had asked whether respondents had come across semantic similarity, or had previous experience with linguistics, NLP, or sentiment analysis. I don’t think I’m particularly creative but guessing at how it must have been implemented under the covers I have to believe contributed bunch to the score I received. It’d be interesting to have seen how much of one’s score can be explained by those past experiences.
- ZoomZoomZoom 5y agoIt's interesting to know the possible difference for native and non-native English speakers for this test. I got "higher than 94.3%" and wonder if being non-native puts me at an advantage for the task.
- pfundstein 5y agoI can't imagine it would. I'm fluent in 4 languages and with each language I learnt the most common phrases and words first.
- LudwigNagasena 5y agoI think it’s easier because while you indeed learn the most common words first, the learning gap between common and non-common words is much lower and the associations in the brain are less developed. For reference, I got 92.8 and English is my second language.
- keithnz 5y agoI got 94.54 and I'm a native speaker
- krackers 5y agoIt seems the way this works is that you get a higher score if the 2-gram frequencies for all pairs in your set are low. But this can easily be gamed just by choosing very specific words, since they will naturally occur rarely with other niche words, regardless of whether or not their meanings are "related" in any sense.
- pfundstein 5y agoOk, do it and report back. Remember, you need to think of the words yourself.
- jhardy54 5y agoDone. Moved my score from the 54th percentile to 98th percentile. My words: Cannabinol, idempotence, median, mitosis, infrared, soufflé, synonym, genomics, tortoiseshell, crankshaft.
- Lerc 5y agoI managed 76.4% with the super unrelated words flag, buttress, tower, stables, kitchen, dungeon, portcullis, throne, keep, castle [edit] tweaked it a bit to make the score higher after I realized the form always drops the 10th word :-)
- Ansil849 5y ago> super unrelated words Did you mean to say that these were all super related, not unrelated, words? Crenel, buttress, hearth, stables, dungeon, gargoyle, throne, flag are all words relating to castles - some like crenel, explicitly so. Edit: and in your updated wordlist, you just swapped one castle-specific term, 'crenel', for another, 'portcullis'...
- Lerc 5y agoperhaps the /s was needed. I swapped out crenel for portcullis because I figured more people would know what it is (crenel was an eliminated word) Also moved flag to the front because I noticed it was always eliminated and added castle to the end because the 10th word was always eliminated and it's funny to have castle eliminated from a list of parts of a castle.
- rowanG077 5y agoI'm not so sure this is any good measure. From running it a few times it's easy to get an very high score if you pick extremely specific words that are not often used together. For example the words "Chair" and "Mountain" have a score of 78. While the words "String" and "Quark" have a score of 86. "String" and "Quark" are much, much more related though via String theory then a chair and a mountain. Basically if you know many obscure words you will have an easy time getting a much higher score.
- mym1990 5y ago1) No specialised vocabulary 2) Only the first score is valid, as they recognize that gaming the test is much easier after the first go. So maybe instead of “string” or “quark” you go “physics”. I may be wrong, but I think having very general knowledge over different topics will spur more creative thinking because specific knowledge will be less likely to be helpful in a completely different domain(not 100% of the time obv, but just a personal thought and generalization).
- kache_ 5y agoI guess this is done by vectorizing words and measuring distance between them?
- the_cat_kittles 5y ago99.74% by mixing simple and extremely specific technical words
- block_dagger 5y agoThe instructions specifically ask the user not to enter technical terms.
- the_cat_kittles 5y agohaha missed that. words like "plenum", "scoliosis" etc. i dunno if they qualify
- Rexxar 5y agoSo if we just look at the score, is the conclusion of this test that if you limit yourself to respect the rule, you are not creative ? Honestly, I don't see any justification why this score should be correlated to creativity.
- Lerc 5y agoThis seems to be somewhat biased in favor of vocabulary. It would be interesting to see if there are similar methods for estimating breadth of vocabulary from 10 words and checking for correlation. You could perhaps use this to scale the score. The cynic in me feels like this would just result in headlines like "Knowing more words makes you creative"
- mkaic 5y ago98.4% by just thinking of words that i could not easily draw a mental connection between, then iterating over the list and double checking that no pair of two words had a noticeable link between them. if they did, i swapped one or both of them out and repeated. my final list of seven was: dolphin, dentures, bitterness, genocide, envelope, crampon, and slime
- platz 5y agodentures and crampon are arguably techincal
- ______-_-______ 5y agoSame here. I don't think I or these words are particularly creative, but they got me to 99.17%: bacon trumpet motorcycle galaxy decimeter phosphorus plumber Maybe "decimeter" is slightly technical, but the others, definitely not.
- jyap 5y agoHaving taken the test and scoring an average 73 or so and then looking at the Twitter high rankings this is definitely rigged against simple terms. Yet the criteria “No specialised vocabulary (e.g., no technical terms)” should rule out a lot of words. Words like moon and elephant will get you an average score but using those words are following the criteria closely. Is it really an accurate test when you can look at other results and then score 90+ 5 minutes later?
- Ansil849 5y agoYes, definitely this. I do not see how this test claims to measure creativity. It is essentially a vocabulary test.
- PartiallyTyped 5y agoThe argument behind this test is that the words we generate are highly correlated, and therefore a person who is capable of generating a diverse set of words also exhibits diverging train of thought.
- deleted 5y ago[deleted]
- layer8 5y agoI scored 90.88 points on my first and only try with the following words: frenzy ghoul protocol concept autocracy hymn nephew screwdriver bail molecule. (Of which only the first seven words are scored when all are valid.) “Autocracy” is arguably the least commonly used word of those. After seeing the resulting scoring matrix, I realized that some of the words were too close to each other like frenzy with ghoul and protocol with concept. There was certainly some kind of priming effect going on when I selected those. My point is, while the test can certainly be gamed, I don’t think that you need to pick highly unusual words to score high (90+).
- nopassrecover 5y agoI scored 85.86 first try with a surprisingly similar mix: lion, asteroid, easel, nostalgia, monarch, dilemma, paradigm, molecule, angst, corn. Likewise I didn't appreciate the possibility that lion may have primed me for a monarch, dilemma for angst etc. The order of our 7 may have changed the score. We seem to each have a Tool (Screwdriver/Easel), Political Construct (Autocracy/Monarch), Abstraction (Concept/Protocol/Paradigm), "Animal" (Ghoul/Lion), Emotion (Frenzy/Nostalgia/Angst), and Scientific Object (Molecule/Asteroid/Molecule).
- wazokazi 5y agoYour score is 97.52, higher than 99.83% ———————- paternity chocolate snowblower troglodytes sediment dictionary ricochet ———————— This could be a fun wordle type game that one could play everyday.
- jollybean 5y agoThat's really well done because those are common enough words.
- deleted 5y ago[deleted]
- kevinastock 5y agoYou might enjoy Semantle: https://semantle.novalis.org/ https://semantle.novalis.org/
- dominostars 5y agoOr better yet, Pimantle: https://semantle.pimanrul.es/ https://semantle.pimanrul.es/
- axiosgunnar 5y ago> no jargon > troglodytes
- elefanten 5y agoTakes a troglodyte would think "troglodyte" is jargon.
- toxik 5y agoOut of curiosity, are you ESL or a native English speaker? It really seems like choosing uncommon words is the way to go.
- wazokazi 5y agoI am an ESL speaker. That said, I did learn English at a very young age and it was the language of instruction at school.
- Ansil849 5y agoTwo observations: 1) people who seem to have gotten the highest scores are not following directions properly (e.g. someone on Twitter who got >98 used decidedly technical terms like "codec", despite clear instructions not to use technical jargon) 2) this seems to measure how extensive your vocabulary is (e.g. obscure noncommon words seem to score much higher than common words, even though the common words may be quite diverse, seemingly simply because common words are...well, more common and so more likely to be mentioned in a sentence together, just owing to English sentence structure). I don't understand how knowledge of a broad amount of words maps to creativity? The person who would do best on this test is someone who knows a variety of very obscure nouns. In other words, someone who memorizes a wordlist. How does this map onto creativity? Case in point: young children are extremely creative, and yet I predict would score very low on this test owing to a very limited vocabulary.
- chevill 5y agoI was in the top 2.1% and I used all non-technical words. The most obscure words I used were trimmed off (it only uses 7) and the ones it counted seemed to be words I expect all people of average intelligence to know. It honestly seems like a rather poorly executed test. Valid nouns that are too obscure or "technical" to be in the word list get dropped but the person I know that got the highest score (95.07 raw score, 99.4 percentile) used "titties" (not even a real word) and at least two of the other words he used weren't even nouns (nouns are stated as a requirement).
- sporkland 5y agoI found myself started trying to use obscure words from different time periods as a way of "randomizing" my thoughts before I knew what the test was measuring. It seems like it could be a good technique, but implies nothing about your real creativity.
- ipnon 5y agoCreativity isn't necessarily useful or profound. Children are naturally quite creative, and we find their paintings to be pleasantly unique for example. The reason little kids don't have their creative works in the Louvre is that creativity is not significant in itself.
- eyelidlessness 5y agoI literally just reacted to my surrounding environment, because I’m sound sensitive and I was curious what would happen if I just used what I pick up from my environment. Maybe creative? I was just wondering how the thing works. 90-something% and I didn’t bother to keep a reference. I was actively regurgitating other thoughts expressed around me, but with no intention other than understanding what’s being measured. Again maybe that’s creative, but it wasn’t intentional.
- Ansil849 5y agoThe rules explicitly say: > Think of the words on your own (e.g., do not just look at objects in your surroundings). I guess technically they don't say to not listen, just to not look.
- saghm 5y agoIs it creative to think of a loophole to those rules, or is it a lack of creativity to assume that the rules are intended exactly as written?
- eyelidlessness 5y agoI would have adopted those rules without being told, but like I said I’m noise sensitive. It was loud, I couldn’t really think anything other than what I was hearing. So I just picked out what felt interesting and riffed on it.
- jollybean 5y agoRandom sources probably have a higher dispartiy than our own thoughts, which are probably coherent in some way.
- S_A_P 5y agoI sorta guessed that the algorithm was words that had nothing to do with each other so I guess the 85.53 percent I got was probably more confirmation of a guess than anything.
- SamBam 5y agoMy score was low, and oddly the word "nothing" was mostly the cause of it (if I'm understanding the table right). "Nothing" paired with nearly every other word (dog, thought, kindness, wind...) scored a high 50 or low 60.
- the_only_law 5y agoMy words: crap cookware tether crumpet bisector pretender sky Seemed to score pretty high. Though I’m not sure if I cheated or not. I wasn’t quite sure what all entailed “specialized vocabulary” and of something like “bisector” falls in there.
- throw7 5y agoSeems like a lot of people aren't following the rules. This test seems to me a good way of illustrating how a diversive group of people can be more creative.
- Guthur 5y agoAren't we all different, pretty sure none of us are carbon copies of each other. And so a more correct non political statement would be collaboration can breed creativity.
- fumblebee 5y agoI can’t help but feel that intimately knowing the models behind this test helps you game it. I consider myself “above average” creatively, but I credit scoring much higher than expected by approximating how the models behind the test actually work.
- andy_ppp 5y agoIt’s a pretty random and unrepeatable test. I think we as a society need to have a profound discussion about averages and how useless they are for understanding people or helping with every day life.
- adverbly 5y agoI don't buy it. Seems to measure vocabulary + problem-solving-specific-to-this-question. I bet plenty of "uncreative" people could easily do well if you just told them to pick specific things from different topics(e.g. an obscure food, an obscure job, etc...), which is all I did and I scored in the top 1%. You don't have to be creative at all to do that. You only have to think of such a strategy, and then pick some obscure things. Also, there seems to be some cultural bias - it wouldn't accept chow mein, but I bet pizza would have worked. Also, the instructions seem silly - the more close to "technical" the terms were that I picked, the higher they seemed to score.
- jedberg 5y ago> chow mein That's two words.
- Ansil849 5y ago>> chow mein > That's two words. No, it is a single open compound word. You can check this by consulting a dictionary, which will list 'chow mein' as "a noun".
- jedberg 5y agoJust because it says "a noun" doesn't make it one word. That's like saying "brown pants" is one word. If you know Chinese you'd know it's two words, because mein means noodles and chow means fried (as opposed to lo, which means tossed).
- Ansil849 5y ago> Just because it says "a noun" doesn't make it one word. In fact, it literally does, because "a" refers to a single entity. > That's like saying "brown pants" is one word. No, it is not at all like saying "brown pants" because in order for a word to be an open compound word the modifying adjective has to create a new noun. For example, 'living room' is an open compound word, while "brown room" is not. If you have trouble differentiating between open compound words and just words with modifying adjectives, once again, consult a dictionary. > If you know Chinese you'd know it's two words We are discussing English. In English, chow mein is what is called an open compound word, which is when two words come together to form a new single word. There are open compound words, like chow mein, and closed compound words, like notebook. But in both cases, open compound and closed compound words are singular words. Edit: and also, the site explicitly tells you to select "nouns". So your objection that chow mein is "two words" (it's not), is irrelevant.
- deleted 5y ago[deleted]
- goldenkey 5y agoYour score is 89.18, higher than 95.29% of the people who have completed this task. cannon terrier 85 tundra 93 84 vasculature 97 90 94 ghost 66 79 85 98 arcana 96 99 101 97 93 trickster 95 89 88 97 73 74 cannon terrier tundra vasculature ghost arcana trickster
- jedberg 5y agoThis isn't really a creativity test. I'd love to see their baseline and how they show this stacking up against other creativity tests. I've taken real creativity tests before (the ones that movie studios give for entrance to their internship programs). They are hard to grade but I think far more accurate. They have questions like: - Name as many uses for a brick as possible in 10 minutes. - You've been told that a scene calls for a visual of water flowing uphill. How do you accomplish this?
- c3534l 5y agoI don't know if those are better. They sound like the same superstitous interviewing techniques that led Google to ask engineers to estimate the number of ping pong balls that would fill up a Boeing 747.
- jedberg 5y agoI think that's actually a pretty good question. It shows how someone tries to tackle a very nebulous problem with no clear answer. And keep in mind that these questions were for internships in making TV and film, where exactly this kind of creativity is necessary.
- c3534l 5y agoExcept that extensive internal tracking showed that the question was useless. The whole point of why I brought it up is because it sounds smart to the interviewer, but doesn't actually measure anything. Actual, validated psychometric tests are typically quite boring and seem intuitively insufficient, while the creative and fun questions never pass validation.
- lom 5y ago> uses for a brick unrelated, but how many can you come up with? I’m struggling after only 4 or so uses..
- jedberg 5y ago
- gridspy 5y agoJudging by the other comments, it is creative to break the rules.
- dandanua 5y agoApparently, this is how the world operates.
- deleted 5y ago[deleted]
- anonymousiam 5y agoYour score is 83.15, higher than 77.96% of the people who have completed this task
- hayleox 5y agoFun one. Got a 90.21 (96.62th percentile) with stupidity, alcohol, iceberg, mollusk, candlewick, umami, rendezvous.
- armchairhacker 5y ago87.31 dog cup vision abstraction green covariance practicality I don't think I'm that creative though so I don't trust the results.
- abnry 5y agoGot above 98th percentile using: microbe, annihilation, annuity, junta, sash, polka, transition, epidermis, tome, token.
- rolfkip 5y agoI got 96.14 with singularity, earwax, toilet, verbatim, popular, palladium, and stegosaurus. Though palladium maybe breaks the technical rule?
- unmole 5y agoverbatim and popular break the noun rule.
- bee_rider 5y agoAssuming you don't misspell your words or use jargon, they only take the first 7 (rather than all 10), so put your best ones up front I guess (playing with it, apparently this cost me 5 points, haha).
- jackblemming 5y agoDid anyone else realize they probably take some sort of distance function on word embeddings then immediately get bored and leave? To be honest, you probably already know if you're creative or not.
- uvu 5y agoI feel like this is testing my English skill rather than my creative skill. Maybe English native speaker might easy to beat no native speaker with low vocabulary skill?
- emeraldd 5y agoI highly disagree with their definition of different from each other. Usage together does not make the words similar. If they'd said something about words you would not find together in a sentence then I'm certain you'd get very different results.
- procarch2019 5y agoYes, agreed. I used the word hose, thinking garden hose, and vacuum, thinking of absence of matter. That specific pairing came to 47. I now see why based on the explanation of the test. However, even if I had meant vacuum like the cleaning tool, I would not associate it with hose naturally because I use a stick vacuum.
- lifeformed 5y agoA garden hose and vacuum are still very close semantically though, at least in the entire domain of nouns. They're both household objects.
- procarch2019 5y agoUnderstood, but the point I was making is that I would not associate the word hose with vacuum unless someone else makes the connection for me. I guess the broader point I’m making is the same as others have said. It’s a poor measure of creativity as context is important. A word on its own doesn’t necessarily mean the same thing to you as it does to me.
- mr-pink 5y agoi got 102. way more creative than you.
- firasd 5y agoI scored 90.56 with: cake, car, amoeba, rhombus, dew, atmosphere, heartbreak The words closest to each other were amoeba/rhombus and the most distant were rhombus/car
- tgsovlerkhgsel 5y agoI think that tells you a lot about their metric... dew and atmosphere are a lot more related than amoebae and rhombi...
- djsamseng 5y agoIf it makes anyone feel better my creativity peaks at about doing paint by number. Somehow I got a 92 (98.6 percentile)
- mym1990 5y agoThe site states that this tests only a sliver of the creativity process, but the comments seem to be taking this as a very hard metric(with a lot of negativity). Creativity can come from being able to fuse unrelated ideas from different topics into a novel outcome, and it seems like this test just tries to boil that down into a 10 word puzzle, which is obviously not going to be a fool proof method, but could be interesting when data is aggregated.
- c3534l 5y agoI think the idea is, actually, valid. But I don't think the measurement is. I think this plagues all creativity measures: you're asking the subject to be very open in their thinking, but the evaluation method must be narrow and objective.
- 314 5y agoI would agree: first attempt I scored 74 and analyzing their distance matrix it looks like their measure is broken. e.g. hammer and time are relatively close because "hammer time" is a phrase so their proximity frequency is high, not because the words are semantically related. Second attempt was 89 after a trivial change to account for the broken measure. Nice idea for an experiment but the execution is lacking.
- lifeformed 5y agoI think naming this "Creativity Test" instead of "Max Word Distance Test" had gotten everyone in here really defensive about their scores.
- rpmisms 5y ago85. Used Libertine and Coquette. My diet of early American literature is showing.
- deleted 5y ago[deleted]
- Jupe 5y agoInteresting study. However, I rather disagree with the premise that "creativity" is akin to random juxtaposition of nouns. I consider that "imagination"... Years ago, I saw small poster which read (paraphrasing): "Imagination is making the simple complicated, while creativity is making the complicated simple" The idea being that one can imagine almost anything (and "random" nouns is really just that), but creative results are "elegant", "simple" or even "obvious". It's a perspective I keep in mind when hearing and/or seeing "creative" things.
- redmen 5y agoDon't like this since it's probably based on gpt3 and I can see how the results can easily be gamed, and how unrelated nouns can sometimes have a higher correlation based on artifacts in gpt3
- PartiallyTyped 5y ago95.14 in less than 3 minutes. Eucalyptus, Zircon, Pistol, clay, anarchy, ovaries, interface, noodle, octopus, fan. The process in my head was more or less mental navigation of the world + filtering. The problem with random search over our vocabulary is that our recall is highly correlated so to find something that is very unrelated we need to go through 5+ mental hops. Given sufficient working memory, it is feasible. Sex also matters, in this case, I exploited my visuospatial abilities to become passthrough and walk through the world quickly to observe as many items as possible, with the idea being that given sufficient exploration, I'd find things that are uncorrelated. Somebody whose primary sex hormone is oestrogen will have better odds of doing what I described 2 paragraphs above since their language centre sees far more activations than mine. I had tried this task before, and the highest score I have gotten was around 110.
- elb2020 5y agoI got 83, but I notice that some of my words were not included in the summary on the result page, including 'fright' and 'stupor'.
- Hammershaft 5y ago96% percentile with: - city - paddle - fingernail - magma - sphere - birdseed - game I can definitely understand the criticisms of how the specificity of a word influences its 'distance'. That's a difficult problem to solve, but maybe the study could calculate some kind of 'accuracy' metric based on how common the used words are.
- Zababa 5y agoI got a 86.44 with the following words that were selected: boat, space, charitable, acid, anger, revolution, code. Some are still a bit close but I'm satisfied with this. I don't like how it throws away 3 words though.
- posed 5y agoLooks like a game created by wordcel to feel good about themselves. I wonder if someone can do the same but for shapes.