Comment by pminimax
2 years ago
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 the test with the same device, in the same lighting (e.g. in the same room), their relative thresholds should be fairly stable. 2. If you average over large populations, you can estimate population thresholds, marginalizing over monitor calibrations.
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. I was not expecting that the median threshold (hue 174) would be so deep into the greens.
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.
I got hue 175. It's interesting to note that some older cultures, Japan for example, didn't always have separate words for blue and green, both were the same color ("ao" in Japanese). You can see the effects of this even today with things like traffic lights in Japan, which are considered "green" by their standards but blue by many others' standards.
There are also other cultures, such as Russia, where light blue / dark blue (simplification) are effectively considered separate colors.
All this to say, personally, I think we will continue to evolve to recognize more distinct "colors" such as teal, which is neither blue nor green but somewhere between. A lot of this recognition power is rooted in linguistics and culture, it's not as strictly biological as one might think.
Thanks for this comment! I dabble in fountain pens a bit, and one of my favorite inks is "ao" by Taccia.
Now it all makes sense (tho, to my eye it's kind of a blurple–royal blue; I get no green or teal from it. But, now I'm tempted to go do a blotter of it and look at it extra carefully in natural light.)
In Russian light blue is “blue” and dark blue is “indigo” essentially. It still has seven colors in the rainbow. It’s just that in English colloquially nobody uses indigo.
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The point is to determine whether turquoise to you is more green, or more blue.
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.
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That’s like asking which way a Necker cube is oriented. It’s both and neither. For blue and green, there’s a range of shades for which that ambiguity is true and you can “flip” it in your mind.
I would actually find it more practical to determine the thresholds on both sides where I find it to become ambiguous.
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Fun, I got 174 and when I saw the results my reaction was "but that is not turquoise!" which I suppose means I either don't know what turquoise is, or my screen has bad calibration/gamut.
Nobody knows what turquoise is
I got 174 as well.
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Funny, 174 by me too.
Here is a chart of HN reader results, based on two pages of comments: https://i.imgur.com/tIQfTjN.png
Mean is 176 Median is 175 Mode is 174
Me too, but I liked the conclusion ("to you, turquoise is blue/green")
To be honest, when I got turquoise and had to choose blue or green, I just thought "oh whatever" and picked one randomly.
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I actually disliked the conclusion, because it forced me to classify turquoise as either blue or green. When it's a mix more than anything.
It lacks the "can't classify" to make it a better tool.
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That must be the perfect result. I also got 174 but it said "For you, turquoise is green."
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it looks like my default is if there is 40% green in that it is green. Thus it told me that turquoise for me is green. Which if I look at Turquoise the RGB color, that is green. If I look at Turquoise the mineral about half the time it is green and half the time blue.
Same thinking here, though I got 184
Same, my answer was “neither” after the third color so I just alternated between blue and green until it stopped.
"Neither" is the coward's choice.
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Try looking away between tests.
I tried twice and got 182, then 184. Which I suppose it more or less consistent.
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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.
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.
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.
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).
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Thats genius
> 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.
> 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.
For me it was like "if forced to pick, cyan is more like green". So I kept clicking green and got 184.
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.
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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....
Will GenAI's aggressive ignorance kill sarcasm and nuance in writing? Or will people learn to ignore AI input like they ignore banner ads?
I refuse to call cyan either blue or green. It’s clearly in between.
Just like I would never call orange yellow or red.
I refuse to call cyan cyan. I just call it blue-green
primary: yellow, red, blue
secondary: green, orange
cyan: not primary nor secondary.
i hope that helps.
> 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
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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.)
I'd check whether there are biases depending on which color you start with / which colors you present when.
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 :)
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' :)
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.
> 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.
> 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.
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.
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.
> 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?
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 :)
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.
>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.
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...
I did this test with tinted sunglasses, could be another factor (boundary at hue 172)
Wouldn’t this then be best for calibrating VR headsets most?
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.
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.
"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
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.
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.)
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