10 ms·

Author here, yes, it tests a mix of your monitor calibration and colour naming. The two types of inferences you can make with this are: 1. If two people take t

• ddejohn 2y ago
  I'd love a last step in the test where you're presented with the gradient, but before showing the distribution and the user's score. Allow the user to select where they consider their threshold, then display the final results.
  • aaomidi 2y ago
    Thats genius
  • pminimax 2y ago
    That's fun! I bet people would tend to nudge the threshold toward the middle of the scale. Or you could do a sorting interface, etc.
    • ddejohn 2y ago
      A sorting interface would be another neat step! And yeah, I think most would gravitate toward the middle. Seeing how "far off" you are would be fun :) Ooh maybe have the user slide a gradient left and right inside a window, aligning the center of the window with where they think the line is between blue and green (i.e., instruct the user to fill the window with equal amounts of green and blue).
      • martyvis 2y ago
        This test gets you sort hues along a gradient. https://www.xrite.com/hue-test https://www.xrite.com/hue-test
        • smeej 2y ago
          It tells me to rotate my device, implying it should work on my phone, but I can't figure out how to move the colors. Holding and sliding doesn't work. Tapping doesn't seem to do anything. Does it not actually work on mobile?
          • martyvis 2y ago
            Works on my android fine.
      • Veve 2y ago
        Ilovehue and ilovehue 2 are excellent mobile games around this sorting idea, they're quite zen and for all ages, highly recommendend!
  • rsyring 2y ago
    I really wanted to be able to drag my vertical bar on the distribution to the right just a bit. :) When I could see the entire gradient, I actually thought green continued to the right a bit more than where my line was.
• egypturnash 2y ago
  I got hue 174 as my threshold and really I just wanted to say "neither, this is turquoise/teal" for most of the questions. But blue/green was the only option.
  • hammock 2y ago
    Here is a chart of HN reader results, based on two pages of comments: https://i.imgur.com/tIQfTjN.png https://i.imgur.com/tIQfTjN.png Mean is 176 Median is 175 Mode is 174
  • hammock 2y ago
    The point is to determine whether turquoise to you is more green, or more blue.
    • jacobolus 2y ago
      The color name question here doesn't have a clear answer because most of the respondents would call this "teal", "blue–green", "turqoise", "cyan", "aqua", or some similar name. You'd get somewhat similar results asking whether an orange (the fruit) is really "red" or "yellow", or whether an eggplant is really "blue" or "red". An individual person's answers on this kind of question are likely to vary from day to day, are context dependent (i.e. whether one object or another appears more "green" or "blue" depends on what kind of object it is), and colors this intense are very sensitive to changes in eye adaptation and technical details of the display and software, as well as inter-observer metamerism. So in addition to the color naming difficulties, it's not even a very good test of color naming, if you want to get reliable psychometric/linguistic data.
      • RussianCow 2y ago
        For a single individual, all of the above is true, but for a large enough sample size, the answers may be more generally useful because you account for all of those rounding errors.
        • 2y ago
• blahedo 2y ago
  > while cyan (#00ffff) is nominally halfway between blue and green, most people's thresholds, averaged over monitor calibrations, imply that cyan is classified as blue Yes, because (at least for me) the thought went "well that's cyan, it's not really blue but if forced to pick, cyan is more like blue so I'll click that". It's like rounding up at 0.5.
  • Tor3 2y ago
    For me it was like "if forced to pick, cyan is more like green". So I kept clicking green and got 184.
    • ryandrake 2y ago
      For me, if forced to pick between two choices that were not correct, I'd just pick one randomly. I think this is a wording problem more than anything.
      • Suppafly 2y ago
        >For me, if forced to pick between two choices that were not correct, I'd just pick one randomly. I think this is a wording problem more than anything. That's what I'd do if I were being paid to take the survey. Instead I just closed the window as soon as it popped up cyan and only gave me blue and green as options.
• Jaxan 2y ago
  I refuse to call cyan either blue or green. It’s clearly in between. Just like I would never call orange yellow or red.
  • nobrains 2y ago
    primary: yellow, red, blue secondary: green, orange cyan: not primary nor secondary. i hope that helps.
    • crazygringo 2y ago
      > cyan: not primary nor secondary. That's incorrect. The 3 primary colors of light are red green blue. The 3 secondary colors are yellow, cyan, and magenta. The 3 primary colors used in printing are cyan, magenta, and yellow (why it's called CMYK where K is black). Cyan is primary or secondary in both of the major color models. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Secondary_color#RGB_and_CMYK https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Secondary_color#RGB_and_CMYK
      • fwip 2y ago
        CMY and RYB are both valid primary color sets. RYB, being taught in grade school, has a lot of influence on how people perceive and name colors, which is what this conversation is about.
        • crazygringo 2y ago
          I mean, I was taught in grade school that George Washington cut down a cherry tree and then said he couldn't tell a lie. That didn't make it true. I would hope that here on HN, people are aware of RGB primaries, and then maybe CMYK. Saying that cyan is "not primary or secondary" is just wrong. Even Wikipedia explains in the first paragraph that the RYB model has a "lack of scientific basis": https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Primary_color https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Primary_color
  • naijaboiler 2y ago
    I refuse to call cyan cyan. I just call it blue-green
• tgsovlerkhgsel 2y ago
  I'd check whether there are biases depending on which color you start with / which colors you present when.
• codeflo 2y ago
  > The most interesting thing for me is that while cyan (#00ffff) is nominally halfway between blue and green, most people's thresholds, averaged over monitor calibrations, imply that cyan is classified as blue. Perceptually (that is, in CIE-LCh color space, for example), the hue component of #00ffff is a lot cloer to #00ff00 than it is to #0000ff. But the website doesn't ask which color is closer, it asks if it's "green" or "blue". And how we use those words has more to do with culture than with perception. We also call the color of a clear afternoon sky "blue", even though that is perceptually extremely far away from #0000ff.
• zestyping 2y ago
  Not that surprising. To most people, pure RGB-blue looks a bit violet. People are used to ink (subtractive) blue more than light (additive) blue. People call the sky blue and water blue; both are closer to cyan. Most people think of a neutral blue as something like #0080ff.
  • lupire 2y ago
    > To most people, pure RGB-blue looks a bit violet. And then our mothers and teachers mock us :-( Is this color bias the same across genders?
• jsvlrtmred 2y ago
  Another variable is the name of the website. If the page were called "is my green your green" perhaps you'd get the opposite result...
• lupire 2y ago
  In USA: Primary Additive Colors: Red, Green, Blue Primary Subtractive Colors: Cyan, Magenta, Yellow But, before digital color displays became popular, the average person had, by far, mostly exposure to subtractive (paint) colors. US school children are taught from birth that the primary subtractive colors are red, yellow, and blue, simply because those words are easier to pronounce, and so magenta is a weird "red" and cyan is a weird "blue" , until the children discover on their own, or in specialized print/paint schools, red and blue are not primary subtractive colors. Humans are terrible at naming things. And to bring it back to Current Thing: Google AI cites this source for its red/yellow/blue claim, even though explicitly this source says that Google gives the wrong answer. https://science.howstuffworks.com/primary-colors.htm#:~:text=Primary%20colors%20are%20fundamental%20colors%20that%20serve,primary%20colors%20are%20red%2C%20green%20and%20blue https://science.howstuffworks.com/primary-colors.htm#:~:text.... Will GenAI's aggressive ignorance kill sarcasm and nuance in writing? Or will people learn to ignore AI input like they ignore banner ads?
• hilbert42 2y ago
  This test is useless or of very limited value. I kept pressing green until the end because you had no 'cyan' button to press when clearly many colors were actually cyan. Cyan is not blue. Incidentally, my color vision is perfect on all Ishihara tests.
  • nobrains 2y ago
    Blue and Green and primary and secondary colors. Cyan is not. The author decided to cut off the colors list at secondary colors. There is nothing wrong with that.
    • digging 2y ago
      Not to be mean, but I think every assertion in your comment is wrong. Blue and Green are English words which sometimes describe primary or secondary colors additive colors. Cyan is (an English word that describes) a primary subtractive color. Colors are not English words. They're physical reactions inside our eye-brain systems, affected by varying wavelengths of light. (Actually that's not the most accurate description of color either, but it's a more useful model.)
      • deleted 2y ago
        [deleted]
    • hilbert42 2y ago
      "The author decided..." 'The author decided' is not physics. Suggest you look at the Wiki page under 'Wavelength': https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Color_vision https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Color_vision Green: 500 - 590nm, Cyan: 485 - 500nm, Blue: 450 - 485nm. Color vision theory is far too complicated to discuss here, and I'm not going to debate cyan as a mixed color of blue and green wavelengths versus a fixed wavelength that's in between both of them. What the author provided was, at best, misleading but nonsense as far as science is concerned. If the author said he was an artist and presented colors as a preferential list it would have been a different matter. BTW, I don't mind being voted down (it happens to me regularly), but here those who did are only showing their ignorance. I'd add the author—who penned here—ought to explain his actions in much more detail.
• nov21b 2y ago
  I did this test with tinted sunglasses, could be another factor (boundary at hue 172)
• mschuster91 2y ago
  > 2. If you average over large populations, you can estimate population thresholds, marginalizing over monitor calibrations. This might be one case where it might make sense to cluster between the reported operating system. At the moment I only have a family of Macs to test, but I can imagine that Windows users with their different default gamma get back different results.
• Suppafly 2y ago
  >most people's thresholds, averaged over monitor calibrations, imply that cyan is classified as blue. I think that's just to your test forcing people to pick either blue or green even though cyan is both, they are just going to pick blue because it's the first option and more likely to be picked randomly.
• LocalH 2y ago
  I classified cyan as green because, well, it's greener than pure blue, and it's also the most greener you can get than blue, in RGB space, without losing any blue :)
• samstave 2y ago
  Wouldn’t this then be best for calibrating VR headsets most?
• aaroninsf 2y ago
  OP have you considered doing a version for this to test contemporary Greek native speakers, vs others ("control" group), for differentiation of blues? I remember reading that modern Greek has two color-names for sky- and dark- blue (not sure what the prototypes are for each nor if they have hue components, maybe the "sky" blue is green-shifted?)... always been fascinated by the discussion of "weak Sapir-Whorf" around this and would be quite interested to see if there are any differences in discrimination... The classic cognitive/perceptual psyche data to gather would be time-to-discriminate, with the prediction being that Greek speakers make faster judgement because they have higher/faster discrimination, than others. Not sure how you'd pose the question to non-Greek speakers tho :)
• jedberg 2y ago
  > I was not expecting that the median threshold (hue 174) would be so deep into the greens. You're not asking gender of the test taker. Your results will be skewed because you're probably getting more men than women. Women in general have more ability to detect green vs blue.
  • dentemple 2y ago
    Even more fundamentally, red-green colorblindness is a recessive trait on the X chromosome, thereby affecting biological males in far greater number than females. It could be a high enough percentage to make the results from this site noticeably different between the sexes.
• itronitron 2y ago
  I checked in at hue 174, the median, which is interesting to me as I know that my wife will test to a very different hue as we have occasional disagreements on whether something is 'blue' or 'green' :)
• jacobolus 2y ago
  By the way, "cyan" is a very poor name to use for #00ffff. The term "cyan" refers to the kind of slightly greenish blue used in 4-color printing (CMYK), and was just a Greek word for "blue" chosen to be a jargon word to avoid confusion with the English color name. It has a totally different color than the equal mixture of typical G and B primaries in a computer display. Similarly, "magenta" is a poor name to use for #ff00ff. The term "magenta" is a jargon word for the slightly purplish printer's red, which was chosen to avoid confusion with the English word "red". It has a completely different than the equal mix of RGB R and B primaries. ("Red", "green", and "blue" are also very poor names for the RGB primaries, which are substantially orangish red, yellowish green, and purplish blue.)
• ljf 2y ago
  It is interesting to test people at just one device. I used my phone on a mount, and completed the test with my wife, children and myself - I was interested (though not surprised) what an outlier I was, as I am colour blind in various combinations, but though my wife scored 'bang in the middle' - it was interesting that wasn't common. My kids were both to the left of the scale fwiw - I was further right than 98% of people.
• wmil 2y ago
  I think you're paying more attention to the mathematics than the social usage. The ocean at a tropical beach is often actually cyan but never referred to as green.