The average chimp test score is 10 on Human Benchmark, or 9 numbers cleared. See your percentile, Ayumu the chimp's score, and how humans beat him.
Published October 18, 2026
The average chimp test score is 10 on Human Benchmark, the site that popularized the test online: the median of its roughly 27,000 results is 10, and the mean is 10.3. Human Benchmark scores the level you fail, so a typical player clears 9 numbers before the third strike. On the HumanRank chimp test, which scores the last level you clear, that same run is a 9.
Nine is also as high as the numbers went for Ayumu, the chimpanzee whose memory inspired the test: his Kyoto experiments only used the numerals 1 to 9. What made him famous was speed. He could memorize five numbers flashed for a fifth of a second. Here is how a chimp beat a memory champion, how humans got their revenge, and where your own score ranks.
Clear 10 numbers and you beat more than half of all players.
Take the chimp test
In 2007, Sana Inoue and Tetsuro Matsuzawa of Kyoto University's Primate Research Institute published a short paper in Current Biology. Their young chimpanzees had learned to touch the numerals 1 to 9 in order on a touchscreen. Then came the rule that defines the chimp test today: after the first touch, every other numeral turned into a blank white square.
The star was Ayumu, then seven years old. In the hardest version, five numerals stayed on screen for just 210 milliseconds, too short to even move your eyes across the screen. Ayumu still recalled about 80% of those trials perfectly. Nine university students managed about 40%.
Then television got involved. In 2008, Channel Five's Extraordinary Animals put Ayumu up against Ben Pridmore, a British memory champion known for memorizing 400-digit numbers. Ayumu got almost 90% of the trials right. Pridmore got 33%, and admitted he had met his match.
The headlines skipped one detail. Ayumu had been practicing for about two years, at roughly 200 trials a day, while the students he beat had almost no practice at all. So other researchers gave humans the same chance.
In 2009, two psychologists at American University, aged 63 and 33, practiced the 210-millisecond task until they matched Ayumu. In 2010, two students at UC Santa Cruz trained for 15,000 trials each, then scored 94% and 96% at 210 milliseconds, well above Ayumu's 80%. Their verdict: there is no evidence that chimpanzees have a better memory system than we do.
Share of five-number trials recalled perfectly. From 2009 on, humans were measured against Ayumu's published 2007 score rather than in a live rematch, and the 2008 match was a TV challenge, not a scientific study.
And the chimp test you play online was never the chimp's best event. The numbers stay up until your first click, and on that untimed version most of the humans in the 2007 study were already more accurate than every chimpanzee. They were just slower: some studied the screen for over 7 seconds, where the chimps took about 0.65 seconds.
Here is where each result lands on the score distribution Human Benchmark uses for its percentiles. The first column counts the numbers you clear, which is your HumanRank score. For a Human Benchmark score, add one.
Percentiles from the 27,233 results Human Benchmark grades chimp test scores against, read on October 18, 2026. Ayumu's numerals stopped at 9, so clearing 10 already goes one step further than his experiments did.
Once you have a clean run, compare it with the table above, then see where it ranks on the chimp test leaderboard. If you like this kind of challenge, the visual memory and sequence memory tests work the same spatial memory from different angles.
About 10 on Human Benchmark, where the median of roughly 27,000 results is 10 and the mean is 10.3. Human Benchmark scores the level you fail, so the typical player clears 9 numbers. HumanRank scores the last level you clear, so the same run is a 9 here.
Ayumu recalled five numbers flashed for 210 milliseconds about 80% of the time, when university students managed about 40%. The Kyoto experiments only used the numerals 1 to 9, so his sequences never went past 9.
Not on this task. Ayumu beat untrained people when the numbers were shown for only 210 milliseconds, but humans who practiced matched him in 2009 and beat him in 2010 with 94% and 96%. On the untimed version, most humans were more accurate than the chimps from the start.
It copies the memory task Kyoto University gave its chimpanzees: numbers appear on a grid, and after your first touch the rest turn into blank squares. The HumanRank version even keeps the original 8-by-5 grid of 40 positions.
