I have attempted to use freerice.com for this purpose (I was interested in quantifying just exactly how stupid I was, in real time, while I adapted to polyphasic sleeping. The answer was pretty damn stupid, but I didn't really need a test to tell me that). I can't say the results track particularly well with how I'm feeling subjectively, but I can't really say which of those is in error. At any rate, this probably doesn't measure very many components of intelligence. I didn't keep up with it because it is slow and it's hard to know when to stop and record your level.
Go problems would be more of a laziness test for me. The ones that are easy enough to not require work I probably know just as well in my sleep.
quantifying just exactly how stupid I was, in real time, while I adapted to polyphasic sleeping.
Could you give a short report on how PS worked out for you in the end? Saving on downtime seems like a major potential win to me, but probably isn't worth it if you have to trade any measurable amount of intelligence for it.
I'd be interested in more empirical data regarding the advantages and disadvantages of PS over a monophasic sleep shedule.
We all have our good days and our bad days. Due to insufficient sleep, illness, stress, distractions, and many other causes we often find ourselves far below our usual levels of mental performance. When we find ourselves in such a state, it's not really worth putting effort in doing many tasks, like programming or long term planning - as quality will suffer a lot.
The problem is - other than observing deterioration of results, I have no idea if I'm in such a state or not. I cannot be sure if it's also true for others, but I had to find out a few tests of what's my mental performance at the moment. Tests that are deeply flawed, so I'd request better if there are any. I also cannot predict my mental state in advance, as my life isn't terribly regular.
The most reliable test I found, and by accident, was fighting bots on a certain Quake 3 map - me vs 10 or so highest difficulty bots. The challenge was to get 50 frags without dying. As the map was huge and full of power ups, it wasn't really that difficult as long as I could maintain full alertness for 10-15 minutes - but if I was tired or distracted, I would invariably fail. This test was unfortunately extremely slow.
Another test would be to go to goproblems, and do a few random problems at proper difficulty level. If I could think right, I would do most of them, if I was tired, I would fail almost 100%. This didn't test alertness, I guess it would be best described as short term memory test, as that's what used for game tree exploration. Unfortunately what's the proper difficulty varies a lot with how much go I played recently, so it needs to be recalibrated.
One more test would be to go to some decent online IQ test like this one. My results on such test would suffer a lot if I was sleepy or tired. The main problem is that such tests cannot repeated too often, or I'd just remember the answers.
So these are three ways to test how well my mind functions at the moment, all testing something different, and all flawed in one way or another.
How do you test yourself?