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 tried twice and got 182, then 184. Which I suppose it more or less consistent.
(Yes in New York and Indiana, no in Massachusetts, and the law is silent elsewhere. Personally I believe that because the torta exists, the burrito may have some characteristics of a sandwich but should be considered a wrap)
Finally someone else realizes that hotdogs are basically just bologna.
>"Frankfurters (a.k.a., hot dogs, wieners or bologna) are cooked and/or smoked sausages according to the federal standards of identity."
https://www.fsis.usda.gov/food-safety/safe-food-handling-and...
I bet if the choices actually said "This is more green than blue" the results would be different.
Or people will naturally intuit that they should choose whichever answer they think is closer to true.
Personally I "tried" to answer truthfully at first and then went absolutely "ok f u, don't care no more" when it showed turquoise :D
Taking how you behave, and extrapolating that it to everyone, (and furthermore being unable to accept that other people might behave differently), is not a winning strategy for life.
Just to add my own anedcote to the database.
I'm talking about random day to day browsing when you stumble on something random on the internet.
It's clearly more turqoise than blue. Or green.
Turqoise on a computer monitor is always missing part of itself, so maybe I should've answered based on that, but I don't think the computer monitor was the point.
It lacks the "can't classify" to make it a better tool.
answer it should have: Its both
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.
I am not afraid to say this is poorly designed.
I wouldn't describe teal as blue or green any more than I'd describe purple as red or blue, so being forced to pick felt silly. Like being forced to choose my seventh favorite Norwegian glacier - technically its a valid question but my answer is necessarily going to be arbitrary.
I would actually find it more practical to determine the thresholds on both sides where I find it to become ambiguous.
Isn't that the point of this exercise?
So how could the point of this exercise possibly be to find the range of ambiguity?
Mean is 176 Median is 175 Mode is 174
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.
> Russian does not have a single word referring to the whole range of colors denoted by the English term "blue". Instead, it traditionally treats light blue (голубой, goluboy) as a separate color independent from plain or dark blue (синий, siniy), with all seven "basic" colors of the spectrum (red–orange–yellow–green–голубой/goluboy (sky blue, light azure, but does not equal cyan)–синий/siniy ("true" deep blue, like synthetic ultramarine)–violet) while in English the light blues like azure and cyan are considered mere shades of "blue" and not different colors.
> Blue: plava (indicates any blue) and modra; in the eastern speaking areas modra indicates dark blue, in some of the western areas it may indicate any blue
etc. from https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blue%E2%80%93green_distinction...
I am not deeply knowledgeable on Russian, I failed Russian in high school, just going off of my surface-level knowledge of linguistic relativity regarding color, and discussions with a friend from that part of the world, so I might not know what I'm talking about here.
It tends to be true that hues tending towards green are perceived more brightly than hues tending towards red, which means that blues with more green in them are more likely to be голубой, but by virtue of the fact they are perceived to be brighter.
But in principle, the line is drawn horizontally on the colour chart (or at least diagonally), not vertically.
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.)
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).
Does it not actually work on mobile?
When I could see the entire gradient, I actually thought green continued to the right a bit more than where my line was.
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.
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.
Just like I would never call orange yellow or red.
secondary: green, orange
cyan: not primary nor secondary.
i hope that helps.
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
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.
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":
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.
And then our mothers and teachers mock us :-(
Is this color bias the same across genders?
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 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.
Cyan is not. The author decided to cut off the colors list at secondary colors. There is nothing wrong with that.
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.)
'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.
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 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.
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 :)
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.
It could be a high enough percentage to make the results from this site noticeably different between the sexes.
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 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.
The ocean at a tropical beach is often actually cyan but never referred to as green.
UK Costco hotdogs are £1.50, which is not equal to $1.50, reflecting both its arbitrary nature and that UK purchasing power is weaker than the exchange rate would appear. (Computer books are a frequent offender here of having the same $ and £ prices)
More metrics, including sRGB, can be found on https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Turquoise_(color)
Whether its a dark room or sunny kitchen, i'm not sure whether Turquoise is ever going to be blue or green. The entire question seems more like wordplay.
I always forget how much white-balancing my vision does.
In order for it to be a true "neutral" test, each test would need to be preceded by a "palate-cleanser" gray screen, or something, and there would probably need to be a neutral border.
> you should be shown all hues at once and asked to position a cut-off point.
This is actually the way I have seen this stuff tested, before.
Not necessarily because the ambient light would affect the screen shows (it's emissive, not reflective) but because the brain also does "auto white/colour balance".
For a fun experiment, get your hand on some heavily yellow-tinted party glasses, go outside on a clear day with a bright blue sky.
When you put them on everything will be stark yellow tinged (and the blue sky will be completely off, like green or pink, can't recall which) but after a little while going on your business, perception adjusts and only a much less dramatic yellowish veil is in effect. You'd look at the sky and see almost-blue.
The kicker is when you remove the glasses: the sky will suddenly be of a glorious pink! (or green, can't recall) Only moments later it'll adjust back to be blue.
A certain wavelength may be absolute blue of a certain kind, but the perceptual system is all relative: "wait, I know this sky should be blue because that's what I've always seen, so let's compensate".
The same kind of effect - although less dramatic - can be achieved with lights that can be adjusted from say 2400K to 6500K and having as reference an object that is known "pure white", like a A4/letter sheet of paper.
This effect, in turn, adjusts how "absolutely displayed" colours are identified by way of biasing the whole perceptive system. AIUI that's the rationale behind Apple's True Tone thingy, aiming to compensate for that.
So the result of this test should be somewhat different depending on ambient lighting temperature.
> Ambient light will also affect the result.
I like this illustration of how strong our natural white balance is:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_dress#/media/File%3AWikipe...
No idea what "AUIU" is, but yes, generally displays should do automatic white balance like iPhones do. I don't know why most Android phones don't seem to do it (pretty sure mine doesn't), and generally TVs/monitors also don't do it. (The required color temperature sensor can't be that expensive?)
The rageguy one would say either patents or "whoa the colors really pop I want that shut up here's my $$$" uncancellable LOOKATMEIAMTHESHINY mall mode, but via Occam'r razor I think mostly because they (manufacturers) simply don't care (about consumers, or about making a good product at all)
TVs/monitors (or laptops even, and more phones that you'd believe) with just a simple auto-brightness are stupendously rare even though Apple does it since forever and a half ago.
Android does have a night mode which changes the white balance of the screen at sunset and sunrise, but this is just a binary thing and doesn't respond to actual ambient light.
It's an abbreviation, and you're one of today's lucky 10000 - https://xkcd.com/1053/ for an explanation of the 10000 phrase.
Take the bracketed letters:
AIUI
Also browser choice: https://issues.chromium.org/issues/40401125
If you're doing this on a phone, try holding your phone at arm's length and against a white background (such as the wall or ceiling) and doing the test that way. Assuming you have redshift/night mode disabled, I suspect you'll end up closer to the median.
But another problem is with displaying the colors essentially full-window, which is going to be nearly-full-screen for many users. When we're staring at a screen with a particular tint, our eyes quickly do "auto white balance" that skews the results. It's the mechanism behind a bunch of optical illusions.
To address that last problem, I think the color display area should be much smaller, or you should be shown all hues at once and asked to position a cut-off point.