[pminimax]

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.

[egypturnash]

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.

[soulofmischief]

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.

[hammock]

The point is to determine whether turquoise to you is more green, or more blue.

[riffraff]

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.

[hammock]

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

[wodenokoto]

Me too, but I liked the conclusion ("to you, turquoise is blue/green")

[bryanrasmussen]

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.

[Tor3]

Same thinking here, though I got 184

[plorkyeran]

Same, my answer was “neither” after the third color so I just alternated between blue and green until it stopped.

[ddejohn]

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.

[rsyring]

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.

[pminimax]

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.

[aaomidi]

Thats genius

[codeflo]

> 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.

[blahedo]

> 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]

For me it was like "if forced to pick, cyan is more like green". So I kept clicking green and got 184.

[lupire]

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?

[Jaxan]

I refuse to call cyan either blue or green. It’s clearly in between.

Just like I would never call orange yellow or red.

[naijaboiler]

I refuse to call cyan cyan. I just call it blue-green

[nobrains]

primary: yellow, red, blue

secondary: green, orange

cyan: not primary nor secondary.

i hope that helps.

[jacobolus]

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.)

[tgsovlerkhgsel]

I'd check whether there are biases depending on which color you start with / which colors you present when.

[aaroninsf]

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 :)

[itronitron]

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' :)

[ljf]

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.

[mschuster91]

> 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.

[jedberg]

> 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]

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.

[zestyping]

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]

> 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?

[LocalH]

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 :)

[wmil]

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.

[Suppafly]

>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.

[jsvlrtmred]

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...

[nov21b]

I did this test with tinted sunglasses, could be another factor (boundary at hue 172)

[samstave]

Wouldn’t this then be best for calibrating VR headsets most?

[hilbert42]

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]

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.