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Comment by staunch | Hacker News Reader

> "When a major league baseball pitcher throws a 95-mph fastball, only about 400 milliseconds—the duration of a blink—pass before the ball rockets over the plate. And a batter gets less than half that time to decide whether to swing, and where. Baseball"

Bah! That's not a knife. This is a knife: twitch FPS gaming. Quake Live at 250 FPS, refreshed at 144hz, with < 5ms RTT latency. Reaction times can be compared in almost individual milliseconds. I'll put the reaction times of the best Quake Live player (rapha/cypher/evil, whoever) against the best baseball player any day.

Interestingly, my vision is extremely good. I've often surprised people with how far I can see clearly. So screw this app: learn how to play a twitch FPS well: http://www.quakelive.com/

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You would lose the bet :-)

Keep in mind that the ball is coming straight on, and the batter must discern trajectory (rising, falling) and spin (which affects how the ball curves) and velocity quickly enough that you still have time to move the bat.

For example, a fastball and a changeup both drop at the same rate and spin at the same rate. One is coming at 100mph, the other at 75. Since the ball is heading straight for you, you must perceive speed by measuring how quickly the ball is moving through your eye focus.

Worse, you are expected to bat in an intentional direction. Meaning that you have to hit the ball on an precise spot in the sphere with an intentional amount of force. It's not enough to just swing hard. I'd guess the bat has to be in the right location with a time accuracy of less than a millisecond.

The good batters make good money for a reason.

A ball that is going to a predetermined area while you stand still...

Hitting a headshot of another player that can go in any direction / velocity while you yourself are traveling in any direction velocity all _before_ that player kills you can be very challenging and depend on very high skill and reaction times

The amount of money a player makes compared to someone in another sport has no bearing.

You have both training and selection in both cases. In both cases you have extensive training and in both cases the number of training hours is ridiculous. However, there are negative and positive selection biases for each. Baseball has million dollar contracts as incentive, but also has the negative selection biases associated with the relatively small portion of the world that has baseball training facilities and the added requirements of physical strength that may prevent many with the natural talent from being eligible.

Large salaries are not necessarily enough. If you select the top 100 people in the world for natural talent in reaction times, how many would meet all of the requirements for being a good baseball player?

Baseball players make good money only if they can combine a top 0.01% reaction time with all of the other skills. There may be plenty of people that can top that one aspect but could never compete for those contracts.

I have heard, and this article makes the case that reaction time for people is relatively constant, but that the pros are better at anticipating pitches. They read body and shoulder movements leading up to the ball release.

http://sportsillustrated.cnn.com/more/news/20130724/the-spor...

I've heard the exact same thing about olympic fencers.

I also experience this one firsthand every week at my club. Beginner fencers lose so many points because they think all they need to do is hit faster, react quicker. When in actuality, they're just being predictable and setup to lose by clever tactics.

I usually don't like to neatpick, but please say speed when you mean it. Velocity is a vector, it is a speed and a trajectory. Thanks.

Not to nitpick, but I think you mean nitpick.

and oftentimes get TUE (therapeutic use exception) for Ritalin for this reason

http://www.baseballnation.com/2012/6/29/3104332/is-there-an-...

This app specifically improves clear vision at farther distances, which seems far more useful on a daily basis, especially since a lot of people don't have good vision. Compared to twitch games that only improve reaction time in a very limited practically applicable scope. Considering the small amounts of time investment necessary to get good results, this app seems much more useful than playing quake.

The way the app works seems to me to be a subset of what's required to play Quake well, so if it works I'd bet Quake works better. I also think Quake has other benefits (like reaction time training, spatial awareness, etc, etc) but it could have other downsides too.

> [...] but it could have other downsides too.

Like sitting on your ass? (I like Quake, but I wouldn't pretend I play it for anything but fun.)

There's also some research that shows that RTS are the best thing for practicing multitasking and fast decision making under uncertainty.

Any benefits are purely a side effect for me. I play because I love competitive gaming.

A hunch about the benefits of Quake is fine. But, elevating that to a status of belief in such short order seems a little wacky, even if you turn out to be right.

"Onto something" is far from "got something".

I probably said it that way so I could hear nice arguments about why I'm wrong. Sorry if that's trollish :-)

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