I had the opposite reaction. This didn't look that hard.
Then again, I have a lot of experience in two related contexts: I like timing-oriented video games, and I am a musician.
The game show movements look to me to take about a quarter of a second, or 250 ms.
This is slow enough to make winning by skill just barely possible. Scientifically speaking, I think 200 ms is considered a good reaction time for a normal person - and the game show requires a bit of processing, so will be a bit slower. Even if everything on the show were truly random, if you simplified things by watching one square and waiting for it to be lit up and not a whammy, I'd expect an average person to just barely be able to hit the button before the game moved on. Controller delay could spoil that, but no doubt the game is designed with this threshold in mind, to give the tantalizing impression that you can maybe do it. Superhuman timing wouldn't be needed - whether by training or genetics, people who specialize in reacting fast can manage times more like 100-150ms.
Predicting makes things much easier. A demanding but reliable target in a timing-oriented video game (but where you can see the required input coming) might be around 50ms. As one example, A Dance Of Fire And Ice seems to consider you moderately inconsistent if your inputs are precise to about 40-60 ms. As another point of reference, Dark Souls 2 offers the player a window of invulnerability time they can use to negate attacks. This combines elements of prediction, reaction, and action delay. The game is widely considered punishingly difficult (but people do it) at the default value of 166 ms and unproblematic around a buffed value of 400ms.
As a musician, it's common to play a piece of music in which beats are 500 ms, and subdividing them into quarters of that (so 125 ms) is so routine that you are expected to do it correctly and can clearly identify when someone has done it wrong. I don't know how precise musicians are exactly, but I do remember once playing an electronic instrument with a 12ms delay and being surprised to find it so imprecise that I had a hard time making music the way I wanted to. I didn't realize I was sensitive to tens of milliseconds in a musical context, but I guess I must be? At any rate, I would expect any reasonably experienced musician to consider hitting a 250 ms beat, on the beat, to be very easy.
Supposedly one of the reasons Ken Jennings did so well was he gamed the timing of the buzzer. Apparently it's locked while Alex (rip) reads the question and there is a delay if you jump the gun. In addition to being smart enough to answer most of the questions, of course.
Meh, I am not that impressed by the reflexes. I counted the number of video frames in the youtube video (https://youtu.be/WltjaxiowW4?si=KkVJPy_e7ALQulE-) and each square stays lit up for 8 frames, or 270 ms. This is quite long. If you memorize the particular pseudo-random sequence (as Michael did), it's pretty easy to hit a given square reliably.
The key insight and most difficult trick is not having fast reflexes, but actually discovering the pseudo-random sequence is not completely random, and memorizing it.
Then again, I have a lot of experience in two related contexts: I like timing-oriented video games, and I am a musician.
The game show movements look to me to take about a quarter of a second, or 250 ms. This is slow enough to make winning by skill just barely possible. Scientifically speaking, I think 200 ms is considered a good reaction time for a normal person - and the game show requires a bit of processing, so will be a bit slower. Even if everything on the show were truly random, if you simplified things by watching one square and waiting for it to be lit up and not a whammy, I'd expect an average person to just barely be able to hit the button before the game moved on. Controller delay could spoil that, but no doubt the game is designed with this threshold in mind, to give the tantalizing impression that you can maybe do it. Superhuman timing wouldn't be needed - whether by training or genetics, people who specialize in reacting fast can manage times more like 100-150ms.
Predicting makes things much easier. A demanding but reliable target in a timing-oriented video game (but where you can see the required input coming) might be around 50ms. As one example, A Dance Of Fire And Ice seems to consider you moderately inconsistent if your inputs are precise to about 40-60 ms. As another point of reference, Dark Souls 2 offers the player a window of invulnerability time they can use to negate attacks. This combines elements of prediction, reaction, and action delay. The game is widely considered punishingly difficult (but people do it) at the default value of 166 ms and unproblematic around a buffed value of 400ms.
As a musician, it's common to play a piece of music in which beats are 500 ms, and subdividing them into quarters of that (so 125 ms) is so routine that you are expected to do it correctly and can clearly identify when someone has done it wrong. I don't know how precise musicians are exactly, but I do remember once playing an electronic instrument with a 12ms delay and being surprised to find it so imprecise that I had a hard time making music the way I wanted to. I didn't realize I was sensitive to tens of milliseconds in a musical context, but I guess I must be? At any rate, I would expect any reasonably experienced musician to consider hitting a 250 ms beat, on the beat, to be very easy.