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sudobash1 6 hours ago [-]
As other commenters here have noted, I found this interesting but a little frustrating. The second color it asks about is clearly cyan (or turquoise). For me, this is like showing an orange screen and asking if it is red or yellow.
I understand that across cultures "orange" does not exist as a distinctly named color (it only got its name in most European languages around the 1500s), but as someone who was trained since preschool that orange is a distinct color, it would feel wrong to "round" it to red or yellow.
I haven't had green-cyan-blue drilled into me the same way as red-orange-yellow. So sometimes I do "round" it. I might note how "green" some cyan river water is, or call something cyan "blue" when it is next to something kelly green. But when I just have a screenfull of pure cyan light, I don't know what else to call it.
As a side note, I do wonder how differently a child would perceive color if they were taught more than 7 colors in preschool.
Suppafly 2 hours ago [-]
>As other commenters here have noted, I found this interesting but a little frustrating. The second color it asks about is clearly cyan (or turquoise). For me, this is like showing an orange screen and asking if it is red or yellow.
This, it commonly gets reposted on reddit and the colorblind sub, but it's basically worthless because most people acknowledge that there is a color between blue and green and forcing them to choose one or the other doesn't give you any valuable information.
harrall 1 hours ago [-]
People are freaking out about this test like it’s some judgement of their character or something. I just picked “green” or “blue” without thinking.
The biggest problem here is that people have wildly uncalibrated monitors that often have color cast tints. I color calibrate my monitors and even my factory calibrated MacBook has a slight green tint.
People should also do hue differentiation tests like this one to see if they have any color deficiency: https://www.xrite.com/hue-test
That’s way more interesting.
dotancohen 5 minutes ago [-]
By what method would you suggest calibrating one's monitor? I use Debian Linux if that's a factor.
throwup238 47 minutes ago [-]
> The biggest problem here is that people have wildly uncalibrated monitors that often have color cast tints. I color calibrate my monitors and even my factory calibrated MacBook has a slight green tint.
Even if anyone actually calibrated their screens, many cheap monitor panels are so shitty the calibration can’t help. I bought two 4K LG monitors at the same time and based on serial numbers, they’re likely from the same batch but LG likes to mix panels on their cheaper products. They have wildly different color spaces to the point where one swallows several points of grayscale*, which means I have to use the right monitor when viewing sites otherwise I lose the subtle gray-on-white that designers love so much.
* black crush I think its called
dotancohen 6 minutes ago [-]
I'd love to see a photograph of a 32 bit greyscale gradient on both. I wonder if some monitors with similar issues would not be able to represent the photograph properly.
ecshafer 3 hours ago [-]
My daughter was watching Blue's Clues. They were doing color combinations (red + blue = purple, yellow + blue = green, etc). They then also did a further step, blue + green = cyan, and did green + yellow = chartreuse. Now maybe its my male engineer brain, but I haven't heard of that color in 36 years, but it does make sense and it is rather distinct.
gdwatson 3 hours ago [-]
> Now maybe its my male engineer brain, but I haven't heard of that color in 36 years, but it does make sense and it is rather distinct.
The funny part about color spaces being that you can't make (pure) cyan out of green and blue, which is exactly why CMYK is used over RYB in inks.
(I mostly think about colours in Hue-Saturation-Value terms, and a hue wheel of blue-cyan-green-yellow-orange-red-purple)
Suppafly 2 hours ago [-]
I only know chartreuse from fishing lures.
refactor_master 13 minutes ago [-]
I only know chartreuse from the liquor.
I thought it was green though.
excalibur 1 hours ago [-]
> When we want violet, we know just what to do. Just mix our good friends purple and blue.
I still refuse to believe that purple and violet are different colors.
scoofy 5 hours ago [-]
I was having a discussion closely related to this recently because of my background in philosophy of language. Languages are functional, but not rigid. The rules and referents of "blue" become kind of pointless around the edges, and narrow words like cyan or turquoise -- even words borrowed from other languages -- are more functional. This is exaggerated further when the functionality becomes very important, which is where technical jargon starts to come into play. Languages should useful to the speaker; they do not define the constraints of the speaker. "Blue" is useful for the average English speaker, but completely useless for a graphic designer.
echelon 3 hours ago [-]
Philosophically speaking, does each of us experience "520 nm green" the same way?
Is my "520 nm green" actually your "635 nm red"? And vice versa?
Are all of our color embeddings different despite the same g-protein coupled biochemical activation?
hellojimbo 3 hours ago [-]
For different brains, the answer has to be no because the images you see are a "neural net" construction and if that neural net differs then the "image" you see is different
altairprime 52 minutes ago [-]
My left and right eyes are shifted +cyan and +magenta respectively, so, no, definitely not — but hooray for the resulting semi-tetrachromacy :D
I would assume we don’t, simply because nerves are reproduced biologically, but I’m not a neuroscientist.
NoMoreNicksLeft 1 hours ago [-]
>the same g-protein coupled b
If my "g-protein" actually your "g-protein"? Is my visual cortex firmware your visual cortex firmware?
jibal 1 hours ago [-]
define "experience the same way"
There's a philosophical school of thought (which I share) that there's no coherent definition.
MichaelDickens 5 hours ago [-]
Logically I understand that cyan is directly between green and blue, but my brain believes it's 100% blue.
coffeeling 2 hours ago [-]
Cyan isn't between green and blue, at least not completely. If you take green and blue, you won't be able to represent a good chunk of cyan hues. It feels greenish and blueish, but is neither, and is broader than any combination of the two, which is partly why some bright cyan objects (like the bird eggs on Wikipedia) look kind of unnaturally intense. Those eggs are a bright, slightly blue-leaning cyan.
red75prime 3 hours ago [-]
BTW, cyan is very poorly represented by sRGB color space. I was delighted to see the real vibrant cyan of the Mediterranean sea.
and device dependent. this is a very tricky thing to get rendered consistently
gcanyon 5 hours ago [-]
funny thing is that I would have said cyan was blue going into this, but the outcome had me classifying the boundary at "more blue than 93% of the population" -- meaning that I classed cyan as green when asked, without even remotely questioning it.
Insanity 5 hours ago [-]
Same for me, I classify it as blue.
croisillon 9 minutes ago [-]
let's be honest, orange is really a burnt yellow
ImprovedSilence 4 hours ago [-]
I mean, that's the whole point of this exercise. In reality there is no hard line between green and blue, and if you make someone pick, their line is going to be entirely subjective, and different than others.
somenameforme 11 minutes ago [-]
That's like saying there's no hard line between e.g. white and gray, or even white and black if we take it to an extreme. And that is accurate, if you slowly shift between the two then people will claim a transition at slightly different points, but it's entirely meaningless because it's (getting back to the blue/green example) not like anybody is going to insist 'no that's blue!' or 'no that's green!' It's obvious that it's intentionally ambiguous and so any pick at such a point is going to be largely arbitrary with little attachment held by anybody.
Not only that but once you pick green or blue it's going to skew your results in that direction. I got a higher level of blue as my result but it's only because that's what I picked since I had to pick one of them.
tshaddox 4 hours ago [-]
I’m aware of cyan, of course, but it never occurred to me while doing this quiz, because the point was clearly to choose between blue and green. Of course there’s cyan, turquoise, teal, sky blue, etc., but the point is to make the potentially difficult choice between only blue and green.
Also, as it happens, I feel like cyan is just not really in our everyday vocabulary if you’re assigning colors to everyday objects. Maybe it’s because it’s rare to see something truly that bright and saturated. I feel like in practice I would end up just saying “blue-green” more than cyan, turquoise, teal, etc.
crazygringo 5 hours ago [-]
Came here to say the same thing.
Like, I'd be interested to see if where my boundaries between blue and cyan, or cyan and green, are compared to the rest of the population.
But there's a whole other color between blue and green! A color that is primary under the subtractive CMYK model.
And it's an even bigger difference than with orange, because while red and yellow are 60° apart on the color wheel so that orange is 30° from each, blue and green are a full 120° apart on the color wheel, with cyan being 60° from each. So it's actually even worse -- it's as bad/nonsensical as showing yellow and asking if yellow is red or green.
stainablesteel 4 hours ago [-]
it's either blue, or it's green. pick a side, coward
moate 2 hours ago [-]
Ambiguity scaring the shit out of engineers is giving me life on this blah of a Monday.
s0rce 5 hours ago [-]
This was exactly my issue. There was no perception issue I could clearly identify the intermediate color as neither truly blue or green.
moate 2 hours ago [-]
It's almost like color is a spectrum of light and we just arbitrarily slice it and decide "this has a name" because we are finite being who demand order from things that are not ordered and then demand further order from that order and get REALLY mad.
Taught by whom? I hear parents are wonderful teachers.
Also, lots of kids don't even go to preschool.
smokedetector1 8 hours ago [-]
The other week my wife and I were disagreeing over whether a house was green or blue. I was shocked when every passerby we asked agreed with her that it was green. I was absolutely 100% sure it was blue. Turns out according to this site, my boundary is greener than 95% of the population! Funny to see this proved out here!
makr17 7 hours ago [-]
In the sitcom Mad About You there is an episode where Jamie tells Paul to put on a tie. Specifies the "navy blue one". "I don't own a navy tie." "Yes you do, it's the one that you think is dark green."
My wife and I go round and round about what is and isn't blue and/or green.
a_shoeboy 7 hours ago [-]
I have had similar conversations with my wife a few times, but I'm the one with working color vision.
Speaking of, I'd be curious about a similar experiment but one that compares how grotesque, for lack of a better word, certain words sound. The word bleen makes me uncomfortable, I think because my brain automatically goes to spleen; grue isn't my favorite either but I prefer it to bleen.
I'm curious how universal that is though. Do others have similarly aligned preferences for one word over the other, or are our feelings about them more evenly spread?
martheen 3 hours ago [-]
Not a native speaker, bleen for me got auto corrected by my brain to green. It doesn't make me uncomfortable, but I'd prefer grue because my brain will immediately understand we're talking about the umbrella term. If grue is said out of context, I'd imagine Gru from despicable me, when written I'd imagine gruel, but, again, because I'm not a native speaker, instead of yucky food I'd instead think about that episode of Masha and the Bear where they end up with a houseful of the porridge.
That’s amusing because I am the converse: my boundary is bluer than 98% of the population. To a first approximation, blue is a very specific thing and all the other colors appear strongly non-blue to me. I do wonder where this preference came from, but it explains all the puzzling interactions between my wife and I over the years.
a_cardboard_box 2 hours ago [-]
My boundary is also greener than 95% of the population. I think it's because I mentally separate cyan from green and blue, but still see cyan as a shade of blue. If you asked me what color it was without forcing green or blue, I'd have answered cyan on most of them.
miriam_catira 7 hours ago [-]
...I get different numbers depending on which eye I use, but both are fairly center. I didn't expect blue-green to be affected though! My left eye can't see certain shades of red as well as my right eye. Bright sunlight makes it more noticeable, but my own skin looks weirdly (sickly) yellowish with one eye and normal with the other.
Whenever it's come up at home, my spouse simply insists "I don't need to know the difference between aqua, turquoise, and seafoam. They're all blue." At this point I just nod and agree, it's not worth the fight anymore. ;)
pleurotus 7 hours ago [-]
...I never found another person with the same experience. Here we are. For me though, it's not that sunlight makes it more noticeable, it's that I will see the same shades until I've had too much sunlight—eventually my left eye gets tired, I guess, and sees a lot less red than my right eye. After sleeping it resets and I see the same shade in both eyes.
Maybe i should talk to a researcher about this..
VadimPR 8 hours ago [-]
I had the same discussion with the color of a river in Albania with my wife. The test says my boundary is a bluer than 85% of the pop - sounds about right!
rubslopes 6 hours ago [-]
90% here, and it makes sense. I'm very picky about saying something is blue!
bitexploder 8 hours ago [-]
I am bluer than 78%. Colors. How do they work.
itishappy 7 hours ago [-]
Blue his house
With a blue little window
And a blue Corvette
And everything is blue for him
And himself and everybody around
'Cause he ain't got nobody to listen (to listen)
I'm bluer than 98% apparently. For me, turquoise is green. I didn't realize that's not normal.
If I'm off on a detail like that, then...uh oh.
tetris11 7 hours ago [-]
blue than 90%, same verdict with turqouise, though what I call turquoise is bluer than what is shown
gobdovan 8 hours ago [-]
You've got the blues.
rnewme 8 hours ago [-]
Same situation happened to me, and I have same test result as you.
TZubiri 6 hours ago [-]
I have this with a coat, but it's blue vs gray. Would be interesting to generalize this tool not just for other colours, but for other colour properties like saturation not just hue.
percentcer 8 hours ago [-]
I think the alternative should be "this is not blue". I was served what I would call a "teal" or "turquoise" but the alternative button shows "this is green", which it was not.
SunshineTheCat 8 hours ago [-]
100%. It's like being asked is this black or white and being shown 50% grey.
reactordev 8 hours ago [-]
That’s the point of this. To find out where in that spectrum your vision lands, not to get a perfect score.
xmprt 7 hours ago [-]
OP's point is that this isn't valid because neither of the answers are correct. If you're really trying to measure a spectrum then the answers should allow for fuzziness. That is, you have a range/confidence interval of where green ends and where blue starts and in between is neither/both.
reactordev 7 hours ago [-]
correctness is not the point. binary choice is the whole point. because my blue may not be your blue...
eikenberry 7 hours ago [-]
It should probably alternate between blue/notblue... green/notgreen. I hit the same wall. Second question asked if blue/green when it was neither... and I really mean neither. I don't see cyan as a shade of blue or green, rather much like I don't see green as a shade of blue or yellow.
arcfour 6 hours ago [-]
Huh. I consider cyan to be blue, but it turns out it's made by mixing equal parts of blue and green light on an RGB display.
I guess that makes sense thinking about it now since it's not a deep blue, and there's obviously no red component, but I never thought of it as being defined as equal parts blue and green.
(Turquoise I would consider to be blue-green/both).
p1necone 3 hours ago [-]
yeah I've always thought of cyan as just "blue, but really bright", which does make sense - you're going from 0, 0, 100 (blue) to 0, 100, 100 (cyan) so it's twice as far from pure black. I also see pure cyan as being much more blue than green.
ajkjk 7 hours ago [-]
There's no way for me to answer truthfully whether teal is blue or green. It is neither. Anything I give gives a false answer. The data is invalid.
pibaker 45 minutes ago [-]
How would you feel about a test for "teal or blue" or "teal or green?" You still need to make binary choices, just along different boundaries. Would it make any difference?
reactordev 5 hours ago [-]
Incorrect, it either lies on the blue side or the green side, you must choose. Neither is not an option.
xmprt 5 hours ago [-]
If you gave me the exact same color code 20 times I might give you green 10 times and blue the other 10 because I genuinely can't tell the difference. So it's not a binary like you're claiming.
reactordev 5 hours ago [-]
If you did that, your score would be 50%, that’s how this works.
t-writescode 3 hours ago [-]
Sometimes the answer can be “I reject the premise.”
I’m sure you’ve had conversations where that’s the answer you want to give.
ajkjk 3 hours ago [-]
I chose to close the tab.
Suppafly 2 hours ago [-]
>correctness is not the point. binary choice is the whole point. because my blue may not be your blue...
Realistically there is a broad range that we all can acknowledge is neither, but is instead teal, and forcing a binary choice means people just choose randomly.
svnt 6 hours ago [-]
But reproducibility should be the point. As a result of the structure it approaches an asymptote from one side or the other. I took it once and approached from green and my greenness was 77%, a second time it approached from blue and my blueness was 68%.
A test that allows an answer of neither would deliver more information (transition points and an error bar) without failing to identify a distribution in the population taking the test.
ImprovedSilence 4 hours ago [-]
It's so remarkable how many people here refuse to understand your point. It's like, there is no right or wrong, no perfect score, just pure subjectiveness, and they can't handle it. If I wasn't convinced this site is entirely bots before, I might be now....
6 hours ago [-]
D-Machine 5 hours ago [-]
But that is wrong. This doesn't test colour perception or vision, it tests verbal classification of colour perception into a forced binary. Everyone could be perceiving the colour qualia 100% identically, but simply choosing different linguistic cutpoints, meaning you can't say this is about vision / perception at all (it may just be about language use).
kshacker 5 hours ago [-]
I think the premise could be stated more clearly. It is a boolean choice. What do you think it is closer to.
Once I figured it, I tried it 2 more times ... and got different results :) but the new results were consistent.
D-Machine 5 hours ago [-]
Agreed, there is no clear premise. Of course that different people looking at the same object will use different colour words is a triviality that anyone over, say, 10 years old knows. If that's the premise of the site, it is boring. People are getting excited because they think this implies something about differences in vision or perception... but it doesn't, that requires much more cleverness to test.
tshaddox 3 hours ago [-]
It’s not really the same, because black and white strongly connote being at the far ends of their continuum (lightness), and are thus opposites, whereas blue and green are more vaguely specified as nearby spots on their continuum (hue).
miltonlost 8 hours ago [-]
Yeah, but is the gray to you more look more black or more white? That's the point.
cubefox 7 hours ago [-]
It's like being asked whether yellow is more green or red. But it's different. You can't get yellow just from alpha blending green and red. You need additive color mixing.
Black and white are different. You can get grey just from blending them.
MattGaiser 8 hours ago [-]
That is the point of the exercise though. Is 50% really where you draw the line?
mort96 8 hours ago [-]
But the point is, there is no line which separates white and black (or green and blue). 50% grey is neither black nor white, it's grey. Turquoise is neither green nor blue, it's turquoise.
JasonSage 7 hours ago [-]
I see it as having a blue component and a green component. If the mixture has more green than blue, then it's green.
The analogous version in black and white is "is this dark grey or light grey?" because that's the one asking you to guess which side of the 50/50 split the color is on.
airstrike 7 hours ago [-]
Ok, but presumably you can make a test that goes from 50% gray to 100% black and you have to say "this is black" or "this is gray"
MattGaiser 7 hours ago [-]
No scientific line. But where does your mind put it if asked without being told which it is? This test is about where you perceive that line to be.
miltonlost 7 hours ago [-]
but when does turquoise start and end and green starts and blue ends? or is there just another color there between them. And then what about that color?
addaon 6 hours ago [-]
I think you're (accidentally?) hitting on exactly the point there.
For some people's language usage, blue and green are adjacent colors, and thus defining a point that divides them is perfectly fine.
For other people, these are not adjacent -- for some people, there's a single color (aqua? turquoise?) between them, and green and turquoise are adjacent colors, as are turquoise and blue, and it's reasonable to ask about a dividing point between those adjacent pairs.
For those who don't use language this way -- do you consider red and blue adjacent, or do you consider purple (violet?) a necessary intermediate? Are you comfortable defining a point between red and blue, or are you instead comfortable defining a point between red and purple, and a point between purple and blue?
And for all I know, there are people for whom blue and green (or blue and red) have a distance greater than one, or greater than two...
tshaddox 3 hours ago [-]
Are there really people whose language treats “cyan” and “turquoise” as distinct colors which are not in the “blue-green” family?
addaon 55 minutes ago [-]
I don't know if there are people who treat turquoise and aqua as distinct, but I certainly treat them as distinct from blue (azure, cobalt) and green. Several of the colors around the mid range in the linked page are not colors I would use the words "blue" or "green" for. That doesn't mean that I have strict rules here; I don't actually know if I would call what you call "cyan" turquoise or blue; ditto plenty of other words like "seafoam." That's kind of my point -- modulo another poster's comment about this being a test of bad monitor calibration, it's really more about language than about color.
I think there's another set of questions here -- why is "blue-green family" a thing in your mind, rather than "blue-yellow family"? Is there a "red-blue family"? "Orange-blue"?
vitamark 2 hours ago [-]
[dead]
StilesCrisis 8 hours ago [-]
I totally agree with you but it defeats the purpose of the site. It got to an obviously cyan color and I couldn't answer either way (it's not blue or green) so I closed it.
ajkjk 7 hours ago [-]
I closed it also. What's going to happen is all the people who care about the ambiguousness leave, so the resulting population is a bad sample even of the people who open the site in the first place.
jedmeyers 8 hours ago [-]
Same here, it's often neither blue nor green, so this experiment is pointless.
AntiUSAbah 8 hours ago [-]
Thats the exact point of this experiment to define the inbetween and move it to either green or blue.
:/
D-Machine 5 hours ago [-]
Wrong way to do it. We know from psychometrics that forced binaries like this just create junk (people disagree with the question, so just choose a forced answer based on some heuristic for each such question like "closest to my mouse / finger" or "most socially desirable" or "same as last time"). So you aren't measuring what you think when you force choice like this.
If you're going to go with linguistic self-report and a single item, you really want something like an 11-point Likert scale. A smart design might get e.g. a person's rating of "blue-ness vs. green-ness" on an 11-point scale, then determine the optimal cutpoint via e.g. clustering, logistic regression, or some other method, to really get something meaningful.
tshaddox 3 hours ago [-]
Is it really junk though? There are several comments in this thread like “people tell me I call stuff blue that they think is green and this quiz confirms that.”
D-Machine 33 minutes ago [-]
Forced binary choices on single-item, self-report questions produce scientific junk, absolutely. This kind of design / approach encourages not only magnitude errors, but also sign errors (you can't even trust the direction of the observed effect).
IMO, growing up, unless you lived under a rock, it seems obvious to me that you will have experienced different people pointing at the same colour and uttering very different colour labels (pink vs. red, blue vs. green, black vs. deep blue/purple, etc) from the labels you might have applied yourself. Differing/shared colour perception isn't exactly a rare kind of topic (almost is like the canonical stoner topic, also common online), so I'd be a bit surprised if this demo is actually introducing anyone to this concept already. Any excitement is surely from other implications people think the demo has.
But unfortunately there are no interesting implications from what this site shows. Yes, it demonstrates the boring fact that: "it isn't clear how different people assign different color labels to the same physical stimuli", but if you didn't already know this...
antisthenes 7 hours ago [-]
That makes about as much sense as trying to compete for who can provide the most wrong answer for "2+2="
magarnicle 5 hours ago [-]
It's a linguistics thing, it's about word usage more than about colour. You ask someone to get a book off the shelf, and you say "get the blue book" and the person is confused because they see a green book.
We are usually not specific in our day-to-day language, and this exposes/clarifies the issue.
xatax 5 hours ago [-]
I think the "numeric" equivalent to this would be "is this a few/many?"
And you would get some number arguing how "several" is a distinct category in the same way this post has people talking about cyan.
dropofwill 6 hours ago [-]
In linguistics this sort of thinking comes from 'basic color term' theory, which lays out heuristics for deciding if a word for a color in a given language is 'basic'. 2 things going against these blue-green terms are:
* They refer to specific objects (a duck and a stone), eventually these referents can be transcended though, like with the case of orange.
* Their frequency is roughly similar to each other (along with cyan, aqua, etc.), so there's no one term for this range (e.g. there's no doubt in a corpus of English that red is the basic color term for its spectrum).
matt_kantor 7 hours ago [-]
I interpreted the buttons to mean "this is bluer than it is green" and "this is greener than it is blue".
gumby271 6 hours ago [-]
"for you, turquoise is blue." Well no, it's turquoise, that's why we gave it a whole different word.
throw0101c 6 hours ago [-]
> Well no, it's turquoise, that's why we gave it a whole different word.
For some people "pink" does not exist as a concept, it is "light red". In English we talk about "light blue", but an Italian may talk about azzurro (galazio (γαλάζιο) in Greek; kachol (כחול) in Hebrew). Is azzurro its own colour different from "blue" for everyone, or only for Italians? Is "pink" a different colour than (light) red?
Before the different word of "turquoise" was created, did the colour still exist and/or be perceived?
Sapir-Worf and its ilk (if we don't have the language/concept, we can't perceive the difference/thing) are widely disproven and debunked, and don't even pass the smell test (learning new concepts and perceiving new things would be impossible). That kind of thinking is so tedious and decades out of date with modern cognitive science, neuroscience, psychology, etc.
driverdan 5 hours ago [-]
Not everything you listed is the same.
> Is "pink" a different colour than (light) red?
No, it's a different word for it.
> Where does "white" end and "grey" begin?
When any amount of black is added to white.
> Where does "grey" end and "black" begin?
When the color is 100% black.
White and black are not the same as red, green, or blue. Tinting or shading a color with white or black does not change the color, it lightens or darkens it. That's not the same for RGB. Combining those results in other colors, regardless if a culture has a specific name for it.
positr0n 2 hours ago [-]
>> Where does "grey" end and "black" begin?
>When the color is 100% black.
But what does this mean? Only vantablack is black, everything else is grey?
muzani 6 hours ago [-]
This is the first time I realized that turquoise is the gray area.
Grimblewald 6 hours ago [-]
Agree, this seemed silly. It seems to be more a question of "would you say turquise is blue or green?" Rather than a question of our blues match. Better imo would be to ask something like paired colours and pick the "more blue" one. Cool idea for a website, but imo poorly formulated.
TZubiri 6 hours ago [-]
But turquoise can be a blue, just because we have a specific word, doesn't mean more general words are invalieated or made as specific.
For example, things can be small or big, a mouse is small, if you refine the vocabulary to include 10 size words, and the mouse is now minuscule, it is still small.
benleejamin 8 hours ago [-]
I think there's an anchoring effect in play here. If you select blue -> blue -> green -> blue -> green -> blue -> green…, you land at the population median.
(The point being that, once you get to a somewhat ambiguous point (after two blue selections), you can say "oh, well, compared to the last one this is {opposite color}!", and it seems most people do that.)
burkaman 6 hours ago [-]
I wouldn't assume most people do that. For me the last few looked basically the same so I selected the same color for all of them.
Paracompact 4 hours ago [-]
You can't assume most people do that, but you also can't assume most people do not do that.
djmips 7 hours ago [-]
My boundary was hue 188, bluer than 98% of the population, for me turquoise is green and then it shows an overall chart which I have to agree with so no, I don't agree with your assessment. I often get into blue/green arguments with my children and that's when I started to suspect that it was personal opinion.
muzani 6 hours ago [-]
That's if you're matching about 40% of the population.
For some, it might be blue -> blue -> blue -> blue -> green -> blue -> green -> blue.
layer8 7 hours ago [-]
That doesn’t explain why I landed 92% off the population median.
make3 8 hours ago [-]
it's a binary search, not too surprising. search over a unidimensional ordered space
make3 1 hours ago [-]
this made no sense btw, this would give 4/3
nazgul17 20 minutes ago [-]
Reminds me of the discussions with my wife. She is from Japan and, over there, you cross a traffic light when it's "blue". IIRC, the word was chosen before international agreements, and the colour has shifted towards green since, but it's still more blueish than in other countries. And they still call it "blue".
seemaze 8 hours ago [-]
This makes no sense. It's like asking:
"Alice is in Denver. Is Alice in (a) Canada or (b) Mexico?"
- Your boundary between Canada and Mexico is at 40° latitude, more southern than 53% of the population.
Rather than asking "Is this blue or green?", it's "Does this look more blue to you, or more green to you?"
Because then your analogy becomes "Is Alice closer to Canada or Mexico?"
phaedrus 8 hours ago [-]
Someone should make a parody site asking whether shades of yellow are red or violet.
miltonlost 8 hours ago [-]
Your example would only be valid if "blue" and "green" had objective answers for when something is Blue and something is Green and have clear demarcated boundaries. You're switching to a literal boundary example where there are actual lines to be crossed. Colors are a fuzzy continuum; national boundaries, not including fought-over areas like the Sea of Japan, are easy to be in or not.
Rapzid 6 hours ago [-]
> Colors are a fuzzy continuum
Denver is teal, the USA blue-green. Canada is Blue, and Mexico is green.
Their analogy is pretty on point.
TZubiri 6 hours ago [-]
You are confusing geographical position with countries.
Countries are not a continuum, they start and end at some specific line defined by constitutions, mutually agreed by neighbours (or disputed through war and diplomacy)
Colours have no such incentive for strict unified definitions, so there is no point at which blue ends.
Rapzid 5 hours ago [-]
I'm not confusing anything. I am 1000% unconfused and entirely on the same wavelength as OP.
You're inability to wrap your head around the analogy is tantamount to.. Not being able to comprehend blue-green.
suuhhhhg 3 hours ago [-]
It’s a terrible analogy though.
TZubiri 6 hours ago [-]
Wow, crazy to see someone thinking there's an official objective color definition
hn_throwaway_99 6 hours ago [-]
I never understood "forced classification" games like this (as an aside, it's also why I always hated Myers Briggs). Maybe it's because I'm somewhere on the spectrum, but it always seems like a dumb, false choice to me.
For example, when I saw the second color, "aqua" immediately popped into my mind. Aqua is literally defined as #00FFFF in RGB color space - no red, equal (max) parts blue and green. So it just felt like flipping a coin to me as it felt neither more blue nor more green.
Fernicia 5 hours ago [-]
This test finds the midpoints of people's spectrum. They're not asking is "is this completely blue or completely green" but rather "is this more blue or green"
D-Machine 5 hours ago [-]
This is the wrong way to do it, psychometrically, see here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47929056. You need to provide people gradations, or you get junk responses / abandonment, and your instrument doesn't measure what you think.
nodompa 6 hours ago [-]
But what about the definition of aqua outside of any digital color space?
I feel like using only RGB values to define 'aqua' is a bit reductive as it is merely a specification in a specific environment trying to render a type of color but with inherent limitations such as not being able to reproduce the whole spectrum, color accuracy on the display, etc. etc. there's a lot of other parameters along with your own individual color perception that goes beyond "it's equal values blue and green within the RGB color-space"
But then as I list all these things I think I arrive at the same conclusion as you, it feels like a dumb false choice haha
martinky24 6 hours ago [-]
It's a fun toy website.
crm9125 5 hours ago [-]
It's ok that there are things you don't understand in the world. It's just as valid for them to exist, as it is you are upset about it.
Even if aqua is neither more green or more blue, wouldn't it be interesting if when given the choice, the outcome leans toward green or blue to a statistically significant degree? or perhaps that there are differences in how it's perceived based on measurable factors like geography, wealth, height, weight, etc?
Collecting data is how we learn, and discover new things. Even if it seems dumb to you.
altairprime 53 minutes ago [-]
My numbers kept varying wildly from 174 to 189, in the same patterns across multiple devices (initial number different from stable next-five results), so I tried a few things.
First I shifted the app to use P3 `oklch(.7066 .1611 $hue)` with range (150..210) centered on cyan at 180°, same as sRGB. No change, so it's not some sort of artifact of colorspaces. Then I upped it to 16 steps instead of 8. The window narrowed slightly, but the same first-then-the-rest shift kept happening. Finally I raised the random color static mask duration from 200ms to 5000ms. Scored 180 +/- 1. Huh. Makes sense, given the image persistence stuff I deal with.
So, for those seeing that same variability I'd recommend editing that first (local response override index-blah.js, search `, 200` replace `, 5000` by hand, reload page) to get a more stable result.
cranx 2 hours ago [-]
This is flawed. Turquoise is not blue or green. Also different displays will show different colors. And a lot of displays aren’t great at producing the hues in the green color space. Idk the test seems arbitrary, but I’m not color expert
D-Machine 18 seconds ago [-]
Terrible bait for midwits. Which it seems are increasingly a supermajority on HN. I dunno, not good feelings about seeing this post so high for so long. Slow week?
skygazer 2 hours ago [-]
I'm not sure what's going on, but in Chrome my median point is heavily on the blue side but in Safari it's on the Green side. Also, at least in Safari, reset leads to a series of perceptually unchanging turquois screens -- it seems a bug. Refreshing fixes it for the next run.
WesleyJohnson 6 hours ago [-]
I'm sure this isn't an original thought, but I wonder how others see colors. Irrespective of color blindness, is what I know as red appear as blue to someone else? How would you even know or describe it? "Red, like a strawberry, tomato, or apple." And they say, "Yes, exactly." But what they're truly seeing is what YOU know as blue. They see something different than you do, but to them that color has always been called red - even though, if you were to see it as them, it's blue.
mikestorrent 6 hours ago [-]
The term you're looking for is "qualia" - one's own experience of sensory inputs, which cannot be compared with others' except through allegory.
michaelmior 6 hours ago [-]
The scenario you're describing seems like more of a language thing than a perception thing. We generally learn names of colors by references to common objects. I would argue that if people agree something is "Red, like a strawberry, tomato, or apple" then it doesn't really matter what you're seeing, that color is red.
Nition 6 hours ago [-]
I vividly remember my friend and I first thinking of this question during a sleepover at around 13 years old, as we stayed awake late talking about what seemed at the time like the deep philosophies of life. This isn't to say that it's a bad question, but more that it's funny how everyone seems to come up with this question independently at some point. I've read many others with the same question since.
WesleyJohnson 2 hours ago [-]
You certainly stumbled onto it much sooner in life than I did. It wasn't until I had children in my late 30s that this dawned on me - and has perplexed me ever since. Funny indeed.
dc96 6 hours ago [-]
Yup, always wondered this as well! The word for each internal subjective experience is called qualia.
Pretty much impossible to prove the original question until we're able to see through someone else's eyes and brain (if we ever get there, that's probably the least of our philosophical worries :D)
We know for a fact that bees or dogs perceive color very differently. But in between humans, the perception of physical sensations can still be resolved when we consider near-identical genetics.
But it's way more fun when you apply it to abstract concepts like love, happiness, or fear!
"Wittgenstein's beetle" is the mind-blowing concept for today if you want to dive deeper into this rabbit hole :)
srathi 6 hours ago [-]
If you want to explore it further, look up the philosophical aspects of the hard problem of consciousness. [1]
It would be interesting to see if llms all share the same internal representation of red. It might hint towards how it works for humans.
Note: I'm not sure this is formulated well, or even if I am able to articulate this correctly.
humanfromearth9 6 hours ago [-]
Chemistry is the same for each of us, as is physics, so I'd be inclined to think that red is the same red for everyone.
stevenhuang 4 hours ago [-]
You'd be inclined to, but no, of the little we do understand about human perception, we do understand enough by now to say that different people can genuinely experience and perceive the world differently, sometimes wildly so.
Look into aphantasia (lack of mental imagery), anendophasia (lack of inner voice).
14 6 hours ago [-]
I have thought about this many times. The same could be asked about other senses as well like taste, do we both interpret the taste of a banana the same?
At the end of the day what exactly are our senses? Are they simply our brains interpretation of the energies that surround us?
Apparently about 4.4% of the population experiences chromesthesia in which they have a blending of their senses and will see colors or shapes when hearing music.
My opinion is that it is impossible to know and if I had to bet I would bet that we all experience things slightly different. That is only based on the thought that from an evolutionary standpoint we already have many diverse traits from one another. It's another one of those philosophical thoughts we most likely could never answer.
WesleyJohnson 2 hours ago [-]
Oh wow, I hadn't thought of taste, but you're exactly right. Fascinating subject.
technothrasher 8 hours ago [-]
Should this be called "Is my monitor's blue your monitor's blue?"
beejiu 7 hours ago [-]
I got a 98-percentile result and realised my Mac had Night Shift turned on.
rootusrootus 8 hours ago [-]
And what if you are wearing blue blocker readers? I am, and perhaps unsurprisingly my result was greener than average.
ETA: But of course when I retook the test without my glasses, I went even greener.
hermitShell 8 hours ago [-]
Exactly, and how bright is your display compared to your surroundings at time of viewing?
TZubiri 6 hours ago [-]
Maybe both are true, if someone grows up and learns through a specific monitor, maybe that will influence and define their blue definition.
yieldcrv 8 hours ago [-]
followed by the number of rods and cones in your eyes, as well as their own sensitivity, as well as your language
pibaker 49 minutes ago [-]
It is mentioned on the about page but I still feel like pointing out that your response to this test has as much to do with your perception of colors as how green or blue your screen is and what kind of ambient lighting there is. Especially considering how subtle the differences are in the final rounds of the test.
Still an interesting experiment, but I would be cautious about drawing conclusions about anything from it.
still_grokking 4 hours ago [-]
This "test" makes no sense. Cyan, and especially turquoise are neither blue nor green, they are a mix (similar to orange between red / yellow).
I had actually a very hard time to answer the questions, needed to overlay most of the color with some mostly white / light gray window and only squint at the color around it to decide. In the end my result was 176, which is almost the exact turning point for most people (and that even while my monitor is set to be more cold than default; but like said I had whatever my monitor shows as "white" to compare; even that "white" is likely technically slightly blue-ish).
Color perception is anyway much more influenced by contrasts then anything else. (Likely similar to acoustic tones, which are very hard to name / locate absolutely than when comparing to some reference tone.)
Besides the things mentioned in the about popup, blue is AFAIK the color we have the most receptors for. So it's imho quite "natural" that most people perceive cyan—which is technically the exact middle—as blue-ish, and of course the color left to it, turquoise, is green-ish (and as it seems, for most people, the mentioned turning point).
ticulatedspline 7 hours ago [-]
72 green though where it drew me on the gradient at the end I definitely would say the line is on green. and the swatch that is says I think would be blue was, well turquoise and not "blue".
my path was basically: ok def blue, ok cyan which would be "blue", greenish sea-foam? teal? ok now I wouldn't call these green Or blue . Then kinda bobbled the guess
crappy monitor aside, Feels like there's a combination of factors, some color fatigue from looking at a full screen saturated color and I think some "over thinking" the colors.
Balgair 53 minutes ago [-]
Interesting!
I have UV filters on my glasses and things really changed when I took them on of off. I was much greener with the UV filtering glasses on. I guess my eyes are not picking up on things somehow.
chirayuk 2 hours ago [-]
"Your boundary is at hue 181, bluer than 87% of the population.
For you, turquoise is green."
Took it 3 times (90%, 85%, 87%). At least, I now know why sometimes I'm surprised that people call green things blue :)
To be honest, there should have been a "neither" category, because that was frustrating to classify a color that is clearly neither. But I understand the need for a binary choice for this experiment.
Turquoise `#40E0D0 ` feels green to me, while Dark Turquoise `#00CED1` , I can agree to consider as blue.
Glyptodon 6 hours ago [-]
I don't like this because many of these transition colors I don't really consider blue or green but some sort of blue-green or green-blue.
I would also trust the results more if it bounced you around a bit randomly rather than tried to center you in. It gets to a point where I don't really have confidence and I suspect the environment around me contributed a fair amount at that point.
Seem to get ~172.
bandofthehawk 6 hours ago [-]
I feel the same way, after the first couple of responses, I was just thinking it's blue-green. So I just had to pick randomly.
A better interface would have been to just show the final spectrum pic and slide to where you think the separation is.
fwip 6 hours ago [-]
I suspect that asking people to pick on a visual spectrum would lead to most people clicking closer to the midpoint.
afandian 8 hours ago [-]
Cool to see this experiment crowdsourced.
Guy Deutscher’s “Through the Language Glass” is a very readable history of linguistic relativism, including the long history of this experiment. It even has some colour plates to illustrate. Recommended.
There are colors in between blue and green that are neither blue nor green!
lokar 8 hours ago [-]
Any system of giving names to hues will necessarily use ranges.
I think the intent here is clear in context.
gkhartman 8 hours ago [-]
How much does display calibration factor into this? I'm fairly confident it must impact the results, but unsure how much error it would introduce.
AntiUSAbah 8 hours ago [-]
I always wanted to have a color calibrator and a few years back i bought one.
all my displays were so well defined out of the box, it wasnot worth it at all. Like you would need to use this particular profile for proper real industry printers to even have any benefit of it if even because all my displays were well calibrated.
I would argue that this would only make sense for highly profesional graphics designer and i don't think this experiment requires this level of granularity.
swiftcoder 7 hours ago [-]
A lot of the color calibration obsession was from back when panels shipped with truly awful factory calibration. A quick perusal of rtings suggests that most manufacturers try and pre-calibrate their panels these days
nomel 6 hours ago [-]
Ambient light color would play a bigger part, with modern displays being fairly good.
LastTrain 42 minutes ago [-]
The hot debate in my house: is it yellow or green. Is there a test for that?
hyperpape 8 hours ago [-]
I think this site is doing a binary search, so that you narrow down on a boundary.
It would be much funnier, and also more insightful, if it didn't do this and let you contradict yourself.
aaronharnly 8 hours ago [-]
Yeah, as I was toggling "blue" / "green" / "blue" / "green" I had the distinct sensation that it might just show me that I was in a region where I couldn't even make a consistent distinction.
porphyra 7 hours ago [-]
There's a big cultural component to it, and many languages don't even distinguish blue and green! Also many languages only distinguish them surprisingly recently --- for example, Chinese and Japanese used to use the word 青 which can refer to both blue and green, and even now, the color of the sky in the Republic of China (Taiwanese) flag is referred to by that character.
Same applies for grey, and many other colours and things. For Indonesian culture, grey is the colour of an overcast/hazy/dusty/ash/pale day, as such, it includes any desaturated colour, especially (most commonly) light blues; so for them two blue banknotes, one saturated and one desaturated are clearly different colours and they are perplexed as to why westerners mix them up. More research of this <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Basic_Color_Terms>. From my research, a lot of this comes from whether a culture's consideration of a colour is from natural phenomena, or from colour theory (mixing the primary colours to generate the secondary colours, developing color wheels, acquiring distinctions for hue, saturation, lightness, etc). Take "orange" in English, or "cokelat" (the colour brown, and chocolate) and "oranye" (to describe the colour of a ripe orange/"jeruk manis") in Indonesia. Sometimes with cross-cultural intermixing, an object could be named after a colour in one culture, then that object is injected into another culture, and that culture then names the colour after that object. Such cultural introductions also extends to mythology and affect, lighter shades could be considered young or easy (as is "muda" in Indonesian), white could be considered for pure or wealthy or sickly or light, dark for ground/earth or peasant or tanned/healthy, red for blood/danger or passion or love; blue-green for nausea or life/vitality/fertility; same also applies for gender and pronouns; man as in mankind, or man as in male, and their inter-cultural/educational corruption/degradations/influences/experiential-biases/subjectivity.
Is it the Rp2000 and Rp50000 that get mixed up? They seem obvious in that picture but it might be harder to tell them apart in low light.
balupton 3 hours ago [-]
In terms of pass me the blue note, yep. I consider the 2000 and 50000 in your photo as blue.
The added complexity is their currency is like paper, so it wears, fades, tears, and marks. Furthermore, there are so many zeroes. Their sizes are all identical or similar. Different generations of the notes are in use, some better than others. Indonesians also use "," as the decimal indicator, and "." as the thousands separator; in practice, both are intermixed with no sense or reason, sometimes even in the same paragraph, even on banking websites <https://en.wikibooks.org/wiki/Talk:Indonesian/Lessons/Number...>, often due to misconfigured locale settings on computers (expect to see red spellcheck underlines on everything on Indonesian office computers).
Interesting.
Looking at each in isolation, my boundary is pretty far into Green territory. But when I look at the gradient, I would place it far closer to the center.
Also, I found that sometimes it looked like there were two colors. The top was green and bottom was blue. Maybe my monitor?
sbinnee 2 hours ago [-]
In Korean, we have an adjective "푸르다". It is somewhere between blue and green. You can say trees are that, oceans are that. It also means unripe.
Yeah, so to me, tortoise is definitely blue.
Edit: typo tortoise -> turquoise
cjbgkagh 4 hours ago [-]
This is like one of those eye tests where they switch between lenses narrowing in on the prescription. The question is really what shades of turquoise is more blue than green.
I got 80 which is close enough, I think it’s really only the extremes that are meaningful. I tried simply alternating green-blue etc and got 60. I think adding some randomness and taking more samples (more questions) would help - I was worried that the prior color left a residual effect as a relative comparison was easier than absolute comparison. The extra random samples could help give an idea of confidence in that middle zone.
I came back as with a measure of 174 and a label of "true neutral".
However, I know enough about perception to know that this called for some hacking.
So as soon as I saw the second color I realized I needed to look at something else. So each time after choosing and seeing the next color I looked around quite a bit, inside and through the windows at the outside (I happen to be in a Hawaii, so blues and greens are abundant) before choosing and I noticed significantly different color perception after looking around, specifically, I had more confidence in whether it was blue or green.
I can imagine if you just stare at the colors and try to power through, you might get kinda irritated.
al_borland 4 hours ago [-]
I also got 174. I turned the brightness up on my phone (to about 65-70%) before starting, but that was it. No resetting my eyes between colors. Considering I’m red/green colorblind, and certain hues of green I see as gray, I’m pretty shocked by the result. I suspect having a binary choice helped a lot, as once it was no longer something I could consider blue, I’d call it green.
parpfish 6 hours ago [-]
I've got a color question that I need some opinions on:
When I look at the green/blue boundary region on an HSV color wheel like the ones in this S/O thread [0], it appears as a white un-saturated region.
If I look at similar layouts in other colorspaces (e.g., something perceptually uniform like Lab) I don't generally see this white patch.
My question is:
- I'm colorblind. Do other people also see a white patch there?
- If this is a genuine problem with HSV, is there an explanation for why there's a hue angle that is unsaruated regardless of S value?
The boundary regions at 3:00, 7:00, and 11:00 are composite colors that have ~2x the brightness compared to the primary colors of red, green, and blue. For someone without a color vision deficiency, they appear brighter than surrounding colors, but the saturation really only varies with distance from the center. For example, to me, the point at 3:00 on the edge of the circle is the peak of a "ridge" in brightness, but appears as a very saturated teal.
I have a colorblindness simulator on my computer called Sim Daltonism and when I use that on the color wheel, it does indeed appear to have white, desaturated lines radiating from the center at those three angles. In the simulator, the one at 11:00 is the strongest, followed by 3:00, and the 7:00 one is faintest. My hunch is that the perceptually uniform color space samples you're looking at have more uniform brightness, so those boundaries blend in to the surrounding colors better. They look nicer to me too -- they still represent saturated, composite colors like teal, but just at a pleasant, harmonious brightness. It's very interesting to compare perception!
ok_computer 6 hours ago [-]
Don’t use hsv color wheel to intuit color space. CIE x,y $year_standard is superior to view color space and understand the tricolor values Z = f(X,Y) in every way.
I think the bands you’re referring to are an artifact.
kasey_junk 6 hours ago [-]
I’m not color blind and see a white barrier between 3 sections(it looks like a 3 piece pie) with lines at the green/blue red/blue and green/yellow boundaries.
No idea why
seba_dos1 5 hours ago [-]
> I'm not color blind
Well... uhm, you may want to verify that claim.
sega_sai 8 hours ago [-]
One thing that I find interesting when thinking about colour perception, is that even if two people agree that a given colour is red, there is no way to know (as far as I am aware) that they actually perceive it in the same way. Maybe the brain of one person paints it red, and another paints it differently, and there is no way to know as we can't get into other people's heads.
MarkLowenstein 4 hours ago [-]
My suggestion is always to look at what colors people think "go together". A Westerner looking at a Chinese temple will say "ugh, saturated red, light blue, and gold, all together?" My own self looking at a shirt my Eastern European wife loves: "dark blue, gray, and orange, bleah". It suggests that depending on your culture, you may have adopted a different visual response, where blood color is harmonious with sky color, or something like that.
layer8 7 hours ago [-]
That’s assuming that there is something like a “true” internal color that external colors are mapped onto. I think it’s more likely that for the brain, “red” is just “that hue signal range that red things have”. Which is roughly the same for everyone (modulo color blindness), in the sense that if one person sees two objects as red, another person will also see them as the same color, and will perceive the same brightness and hue relation relative to other objects with adjacent brightness and/or hue.
Meaning, there is no absolute color, the brain just learns what things have the same color, and how similar or dissimilar they are in hue to other objects. And for example “cold” colors are cold because we associate them with cold things, not because of some independent “qualia”.
If I'm looking at a certain color of green illumination and then cover one eye then the other, my perception of that color shifts slightly. It's still green, but with one eye it is "brighter" than the other eye.
rootusrootus 8 hours ago [-]
yep, this is the sort of question I pose to my kids. “How can you know that what you see as blue is not what I see as red?”
VadimPR 8 hours ago [-]
I find that fascinating as well! I hope tech will give us the answer in our lifetimes.
dbcurtis 8 hours ago [-]
Who else tried with both eyes? A few years ago I had an implant to treat cataracts. It was notable at the time that the "new" eye was less yellow-tinted than the aged-in-place eye. I was told that the lens does yellow with age. Over time, my brain mostly adjusted, but on this test I did notice a subtle hue difference between eyes. Did anyone else try that experiment?
eecc 8 hours ago [-]
Can you accommodate with the implant?
dbcurtis 8 hours ago [-]
No. I got it set for distance vision. There are modern implants that are "multi-focal". But they work by spreading out the light, so everything is less bright at any distance. My two pieces of anecdata are: 1. A friend with multi-focal implants says that he needs a very bright light for reading now. Which is one of the reasons I avoided multi-focal. 2. My optometrist got multi-focal, and he noted that it required retraining his brain somewhat, because now instead of accommodation providing focus, focus requires mental attention to the subject of interest.
Cataract implant technology is moving very fast, and my data is about 5 years old, so YMMV.
aidenn0 6 hours ago [-]
Just last week I called something blue and my daughter objected; she said it was green. After discussion we both agreed it was was teal and she said roughly "but teal is a shade of green." To me Teal is a (admittedly greenish) shade of blue.
notatoad 3 hours ago [-]
I did it twice. The first time, I was bluer than 57% the second time I was greener than 63%.
jumploops 6 hours ago [-]
Curious how this looks for red/green colorblind folks?
Do they see everything beyond the initial green as a shade of blue?
--Edit--
My red/green colorblind father just got back me with this result:
> Your boundary is at hue 175, bluer than 68% of the population. For you, turquoise is green.
hyperific 1 hours ago [-]
It just keeps showing me the same color over and over.
FpUser 24 minutes ago [-]
>"Your boundary is at hue 187, bluer than 97% of the population. For you, turquoise is green"
Problem is that it asks to categorize colors that to me are neither blue nor green
rendx 8 hours ago [-]
> Your boundary is at hue 174, just like the population median. You're a true neutral.
Night_Thastus 4 hours ago [-]
This is also going to be very difficult because:
* HDR vs SDR mode
* Different monitors have different color replication ranges
* Monitor and OS color and brightness controls (brightness affects color perception)
* Interior lighting
* Monitor technology (LCD, OLED, etc)
Meaning even if a color was meant to be X, it just won't appear that way given the combinations above.
7 hours ago [-]
danbmil99 7 hours ago [-]
Dunno if this is a late-in-life thing or I was always like this, but I definitely need more blue to see blue than most (this test put me at 82%, I think that means I'm in the lowest quintile for seeing blue?) Bright blue still looks mighty blue, but when light is dim, I basically see black where most would still see blue.
Practical ramifications:
* Some of my 'black' shirts are blue when it's sunny
* Popular desktop themes (solarized dark) have text that is completely unreadable
chirayuk 2 hours ago [-]
I'm at 87%. How would you classify Turquoise (`#40e0d0`) and Dark Turqoise (`#00CED1`)?
turboladen 6 hours ago [-]
Same here at 82%, although I don’t think I’m seeing blues as black.
torginus 7 hours ago [-]
I think your monitor or room lighting might just be different from others'
ozten 5 hours ago [-]
Showing the completion screen and giving the ability to use a slider to pick the center might be more useful.
In Japanese, the "go" traffic light is referred to as "blue."
nubinetwork 8 hours ago [-]
I must be colourblind, most of those look the same on my phone.
QuantumNomad_ 8 hours ago [-]
Same. There were like three different colors at first and then the remainder looked mostly the same.
Also, I wonder how the results are affected by my screen and environment. I’m on an iPhone in a dark room, with brightness turned all the way down and I currently have TrueTone enabled and Night Shift enabled.
I was bluer than x percent of the median. Night Shift mode reduces blue light exposure. At daytime with Night Shift off, I would surely be seeing the boundary earlier, as there would be more blue light transmitted by my screen.
I may have to repeat the attempt multiple times on different screens and lighting conditions (both indoors annd outside) and see if the results vary wildly or not. I think they will.
harrall 7 hours ago [-]
One of my eyes sees (very) slightly greener than the other one.
But with both eyes I got
> Your boundary is at hue 174, just like the population median. You're a true neutral.
I should test with one eye.
red75prime 8 hours ago [-]
I forgot that my display is in night mode (reducing blue light intensity). And I ended up with "your boundary is bluer than 98% of the population."
HoldOnAMinute 8 hours ago [-]
>> Your boundary is at hue 177, bluer than 76% of the population. For you, turquoise is green.
Not really sure how to interpret this. Where is "normal" on the curve?
dbcurtis 8 hours ago [-]
It seems to me there is a broad range of "normal", as in well within the standard spec sheet tolerances for humans. It is more about what is average or median.
rationalist 8 hours ago [-]
The About section at the end said most people average around 175.
dc96 6 hours ago [-]
Noticing on my monitor that it's more blue if I tiptoe and look down, and it's obviously green when looking at below.
I think a better way to standardize this without too much variance in color would be make the user denote on the screen where they are actually looking perpendicular to the screen and judge from that area.
merge_software 3 hours ago [-]
This is really great. Love the chart at the end. Apparently I evaluate heavily toward thinking green is blue.
The test's gradient does not have even luminence/saturation.
It needs to interpolate between blue and green in the CIELAB color space.
FarmerPotato 7 hours ago [-]
Thanks to the TMS9918, I know cyan when I see it! Years of seeing cyan on a composite monitor where hue is tricky to adjust. My tolerance for the amount of green allowed in cyan is higher. And if it's cyan, it's blue. I see I classified quite a few greenish as cyan therefore blue.
caymanjim 6 hours ago [-]
I wouldn't call most of those colors green or blue. Most of them looked identical to me as well. I ended up picking arbitrarily for all but the two I thought were distinctly one or the other.
debpalash 2 hours ago [-]
almost got fooled by blue being green or vice versa. nice experiment!
mbo 7 hours ago [-]
I feel like there needs to be some sort of intermediate black screen between the questions, a visual "palette cleanser" if you will. I was actively noticing the saturation of the color decline as I stared at the screen.
adxl 4 hours ago [-]
I used to own a house in California which I swore was peach, my coworker told me face it the house is pink.
bojo 6 hours ago [-]
While neat, I don't get consistent scores if I retry it a few times. If it leads with a series of greens first, my score is more green oriented, and vice versa.
I have my doubts about the value of a two-alternative forced choice task for this. I was pretty much answering randomly both of the time because I wouldn't ncessarily have called either green or blue.
Rapzid 7 hours ago [-]
I don't find this compelling as it seems to me it's well acknowledged there are colors that are BOTH. As in there are colors widely considered to be blue-green. Blue and Green.
Xcelerate 6 hours ago [-]
My mind was blown once when I heard multiple people calling yellow Gatorade (lemon lime) green. I have no clue how anyone perceives it that way.
nox21125 8 hours ago [-]
>> Your boundary is at hue 173, greener than 57% of the population. For you, turquoise is blue.
very subtle changes in color after the first two. it also seems to be repeating blue -> green -> blue -> green, for me atleast.
turtleyacht 6 hours ago [-]
> Your boundary is at hue 181, bluer than 87% of the population. For you, turquoise is green.
Pretty sure I accidentally picked blue for a green once.
wilj 8 hours ago [-]
This is awesome! I have a slight case of tritanopia in one eye and it was neat to see the difference. My boundary is bluer by 59% in one eye and 87% in the other. It tracks with what I would have expected.
Insanity 5 hours ago [-]
Would be cool to see a gender distribution. Women perceive more colours than men, wonder how it impacts this.
mncharity 3 hours ago [-]
The xkcd color survey[1] was 16 years ago now. With the data available, there were various follow-ups. Many, including xkcd's own "take it for fun here" link there in [1], are now 404. But the strata[2] and word cloud[3] are still up, and relevant here.
The data remains available. It was a TidyTuesday ("social data project") for 2025-07-08.[4] This response[5] looked at TFA. (This week's TT is ag tariffs.[9])
I just did a quick and sloppy search, so there's likely more out there. Curiously, I found AIMode and Bing/chat less immediately helpful than I'd have guessed.
Years ago I used the xkcd data for a prototype web interactive for kids, which shader filtered video to selected colors... but it was overlapping rather than a partition, and I'd never leave out cyan. Hmm, maybe a vibe coding target.
Interesting, I got a completely different result on green/blue on this one, way more green whereas I got average on the individual test. Going between very different colors makes it hard to reset - they might consider breaks between spectra.
dueltmp_yufsy 8 hours ago [-]
I was always fascinated by this kind of question as a kid. Like I would imagine that everyone had all the colors mixed up and we were each seeing something different.
layer8 7 hours ago [-]
This only checks a single brightness level per hue. I bet that two people who agree for those levels might very well disagree at other levels, and vice versa.
SamInTheShell 5 hours ago [-]
Showed me teal but only have options for blue and green. Teal ain't either.
iterateoften 7 hours ago [-]
Im left delighted to find out something new, but left wanting to know how to use it.
Like if im 75% on the green transition, how do i use this information.
glial 7 hours ago [-]
Send it to a significant other, then discuss your differences. Will provide you with a new in-joke.
malbs 7 hours ago [-]
Also no way to account for the variation of LCD displays. The same "colour" can look different on two different panels
8 hours ago [-]
timnetworks 8 hours ago [-]
> Your boundary is at hue 172, greener than 63% of the population. For you, turquoise is blue.
isn't turquoise exactly (50%) between the two?
chao- 8 hours ago [-]
The "exact 50%", or the boundary between green and blue, is nominally hue 180, which is cyan. A search for the RGB, CMYK and HSL for turquoise yielded a few hue values from 171 to 174 (depending who you trust, and allowing for a bit of drift due to colorspace conversions). In any case, 171, 172, 173, and 174 are all on the green side of cyan.
tjwebbnorfolk 8 hours ago [-]
After 4 clicks, I can no longer decide whether it is green or blue. I would pick "neither" if it were offered
stephenlf 7 hours ago [-]
Fun. Are you accepting PRs? I would love to add a “share” button that shares the color I landed on
softbuilder 7 hours ago [-]
I want this but for blue vs. purple.
D-Machine 5 hours ago [-]
Asinine and meaningless. Forces a classification on something that obviously anyone with fully-functioning colour vision will classify as "aquamarine" or "turquoise" or etc.
This has nothing at all to do with colour perception, or, if actual differences in perception are involved, this test fails to distinguish those from individual differences in assignment to linguistic categories.
EDIT: To actually test something like this, you need to make an assumption that cannot easily be tested or supported by evidence.
E.g. say we could all agree that, generally, blue + orange is a more pleasant pairing than blue + green. One might then imagine a series of images using orange + varying interpolations between blue and green, with the prompt being "is this combination of colours more or less aesthetically pleasing than the last". The average cutpoint could then be interpreted as a subjective judgement of where e.g. teals become "more blue", from an aesthetic / complementary standpoint. But this test does nothing of the sort.
reassess_blind 6 hours ago [-]
Tried it on two displays, one I’m 82% green, the other I’m 75% blue.
cwillu 6 hours ago [-]
For some reason, dragging the window makes the chart re-animate.
nektro 8 hours ago [-]
> Your boundary is at hue 174, just like the population median. You're a true neutral.
LocalH 6 hours ago [-]
Also needs a button "this is both" for colors like cyan
OwlGoesHoot 6 hours ago [-]
Man doesn’t understand teal the website
anyfoo 7 hours ago [-]
Wow. Did anyone else have some serious trouble with this?
The first color was obvious to me, as it was designed to be (it even tells you if you intentionally misclick). But at the very next color, the first "test color", I literally face palmed and said "oh my god" out loudly.
It was so, so hard for me to decide. I really just wanted to pick a non-existent "teal" option. Both "blue" or "green" felt wrong and equally right at the same time.
It just got harder from there. At the end, it told me that my threshold is "bluer than 80% of the population", but honestly, I don't think that's really true in my case. I was so ambivalent, my choices really felt random to me very quickly.
I think things are green that other people think are grey. Never heard of that with anyone else.
heavymemory 2 hours ago [-]
always blue
wat10000 8 hours ago [-]
I wonder how much of this is testing people's eyes/brains, and how much is testing their screens.
zuminator 7 hours ago [-]
When the final threshold image was displayed, I felt that the boundary was too far over to the left and I had a fair amount of green on the blue side.
I think this would work better if the hues jumped around a bit instead of blatantly triangulating, so that you wouldn't be biased by your prior semection.
andai 6 hours ago [-]
Pro tip, I had my device's blue light filter enabled.
I want to say that shifted my score a lot. But every time I play I get a pretty different score, even on the same screen calibration. So, uh...
foxes 6 hours ago [-]
I just took it to mean is this more blue or green rather than literally blue or green. Correct answer is then 180, anything else is clearly a fail :)
ece 6 hours ago [-]
I got hue 175 twice, but bluer than 66% of the population once and 59% the second time.
salehso 1 hours ago [-]
I enjoyed this more than I should lol
7 hours ago [-]
u8080 7 hours ago [-]
Midori
antisthenes 7 hours ago [-]
This assumes that the person you're testing isn't aware of the whole category of colors that sit between green and blue?
There's teal, cyan, aquamarine, etc...It's such a uniquely american notion to force someone to categorize something (incorrectly) into one of 2 things. Almost a comical parallel to the political system.
moffkalast 8 hours ago [-]
This is cyan!
nicebyte 8 hours ago [-]
it's a neat experiment but I think it's ultimately flawed because color is usually perceived in context, and depending on context I could easily see anyone reinterpreting the hues they labeled "green" in this test as blue, and vice versa.
EDIT:
in general, blue is a pretty fascinating color. yes, many cultures have a somewhat blurry distinction between blue and green. Some others seem to differentiate shades of blue that others don't (i.e. in Russian "голубой" and "синий" refer to distinct colors but in English those would be just shades of blue). I guess there's something about photons in that energy band that messes with perception. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Non-photo_blue
I understand that across cultures "orange" does not exist as a distinctly named color (it only got its name in most European languages around the 1500s), but as someone who was trained since preschool that orange is a distinct color, it would feel wrong to "round" it to red or yellow.
I haven't had green-cyan-blue drilled into me the same way as red-orange-yellow. So sometimes I do "round" it. I might note how "green" some cyan river water is, or call something cyan "blue" when it is next to something kelly green. But when I just have a screenfull of pure cyan light, I don't know what else to call it.
As a side note, I do wonder how differently a child would perceive color if they were taught more than 7 colors in preschool.
This, it commonly gets reposted on reddit and the colorblind sub, but it's basically worthless because most people acknowledge that there is a color between blue and green and forcing them to choose one or the other doesn't give you any valuable information.
The biggest problem here is that people have wildly uncalibrated monitors that often have color cast tints. I color calibrate my monitors and even my factory calibrated MacBook has a slight green tint.
People should also do hue differentiation tests like this one to see if they have any color deficiency: https://www.xrite.com/hue-test
That’s way more interesting.
Even if anyone actually calibrated their screens, many cheap monitor panels are so shitty the calibration can’t help. I bought two 4K LG monitors at the same time and based on serial numbers, they’re likely from the same batch but LG likes to mix panels on their cheaper products. They have wildly different color spaces to the point where one swallows several points of grayscale*, which means I have to use the right monitor when viewing sites otherwise I lose the subtle gray-on-white that designers love so much.
* black crush I think its called
You need to get into either fishing (chartreuse lures are common) or cocktails: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chartreuse_(liqueur) .
(I mostly think about colours in Hue-Saturation-Value terms, and a hue wheel of blue-cyan-green-yellow-orange-red-purple)
I thought it was green though.
I still refuse to believe that purple and violet are different colors.
Is my "520 nm green" actually your "635 nm red"? And vice versa?
Are all of our color embeddings different despite the same g-protein coupled biochemical activation?
I would assume we don’t, simply because nerves are reproduced biologically, but I’m not a neuroscientist.
If my "g-protein" actually your "g-protein"? Is my visual cortex firmware your visual cortex firmware?
There's a philosophical school of thought (which I share) that there's no coherent definition.
[0] https://dynomight.net/colors/#2
[1] - https://colordesigner.io/color-mixer
Also, as it happens, I feel like cyan is just not really in our everyday vocabulary if you’re assigning colors to everyday objects. Maybe it’s because it’s rare to see something truly that bright and saturated. I feel like in practice I would end up just saying “blue-green” more than cyan, turquoise, teal, etc.
Like, I'd be interested to see if where my boundaries between blue and cyan, or cyan and green, are compared to the rest of the population.
But there's a whole other color between blue and green! A color that is primary under the subtractive CMYK model.
And it's an even bigger difference than with orange, because while red and yellow are 60° apart on the color wheel so that orange is 30° from each, blue and green are a full 120° apart on the color wheel, with cyan being 60° from each. So it's actually even worse -- it's as bad/nonsensical as showing yellow and asking if yellow is red or green.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Color
https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/color/
Also, lots of kids don't even go to preschool.
My wife and I go round and round about what is and isn't blue and/or green.
Speaking of, I'd be curious about a similar experiment but one that compares how grotesque, for lack of a better word, certain words sound. The word bleen makes me uncomfortable, I think because my brain automatically goes to spleen; grue isn't my favorite either but I prefer it to bleen.
I'm curious how universal that is though. Do others have similarly aligned preferences for one word over the other, or are our feelings about them more evenly spread?
Whenever it's come up at home, my spouse simply insists "I don't need to know the difference between aqua, turquoise, and seafoam. They're all blue." At this point I just nod and agree, it's not worth the fight anymore. ;)
For this, you just lost The Game.
https://xkcd.com/391/
If I'm off on a detail like that, then...uh oh.
I guess that makes sense thinking about it now since it's not a deep blue, and there's obviously no red component, but I never thought of it as being defined as equal parts blue and green.
(Turquoise I would consider to be blue-green/both).
I’m sure you’ve had conversations where that’s the answer you want to give.
Realistically there is a broad range that we all can acknowledge is neither, but is instead teal, and forcing a binary choice means people just choose randomly.
A test that allows an answer of neither would deliver more information (transition points and an error bar) without failing to identify a distribution in the population taking the test.
Once I figured it, I tried it 2 more times ... and got different results :) but the new results were consistent.
Black and white are different. You can get grey just from blending them.
The analogous version in black and white is "is this dark grey or light grey?" because that's the one asking you to guess which side of the 50/50 split the color is on.
For some people's language usage, blue and green are adjacent colors, and thus defining a point that divides them is perfectly fine.
For other people, these are not adjacent -- for some people, there's a single color (aqua? turquoise?) between them, and green and turquoise are adjacent colors, as are turquoise and blue, and it's reasonable to ask about a dividing point between those adjacent pairs.
For those who don't use language this way -- do you consider red and blue adjacent, or do you consider purple (violet?) a necessary intermediate? Are you comfortable defining a point between red and blue, or are you instead comfortable defining a point between red and purple, and a point between purple and blue?
And for all I know, there are people for whom blue and green (or blue and red) have a distance greater than one, or greater than two...
I think there's another set of questions here -- why is "blue-green family" a thing in your mind, rather than "blue-yellow family"? Is there a "red-blue family"? "Orange-blue"?
:/
If you're going to go with linguistic self-report and a single item, you really want something like an 11-point Likert scale. A smart design might get e.g. a person's rating of "blue-ness vs. green-ness" on an 11-point scale, then determine the optimal cutpoint via e.g. clustering, logistic regression, or some other method, to really get something meaningful.
IMO, growing up, unless you lived under a rock, it seems obvious to me that you will have experienced different people pointing at the same colour and uttering very different colour labels (pink vs. red, blue vs. green, black vs. deep blue/purple, etc) from the labels you might have applied yourself. Differing/shared colour perception isn't exactly a rare kind of topic (almost is like the canonical stoner topic, also common online), so I'd be a bit surprised if this demo is actually introducing anyone to this concept already. Any excitement is surely from other implications people think the demo has.
But unfortunately there are no interesting implications from what this site shows. Yes, it demonstrates the boring fact that: "it isn't clear how different people assign different color labels to the same physical stimuli", but if you didn't already know this...
We are usually not specific in our day-to-day language, and this exposes/clarifies the issue.
And you would get some number arguing how "several" is a distinct category in the same way this post has people talking about cyan.
* They refer to specific objects (a duck and a stone), eventually these referents can be transcended though, like with the case of orange. * Their frequency is roughly similar to each other (along with cyan, aqua, etc.), so there's no one term for this range (e.g. there's no doubt in a corpus of English that red is the basic color term for its spectrum).
For some people "pink" does not exist as a concept, it is "light red". In English we talk about "light blue", but an Italian may talk about azzurro (galazio (γαλάζιο) in Greek; kachol (כחול) in Hebrew). Is azzurro its own colour different from "blue" for everyone, or only for Italians? Is "pink" a different colour than (light) red?
Before the different word of "turquoise" was created, did the colour still exist and/or be perceived?
* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Turquoise#Names
If a language/culture does not have a word for "blue" does that mean the colour does not exist?
* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Basic_Color_Terms
* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blue–green_distinction_in_lang...
Where does "white" end and "grey" begin? Where does "grey" end and "black" begin?
* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shades_of_white
* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shades_of_gray
* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shades_of_black
Also, a bit of fun with brown:
* https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wh4aWZRtTwU
> Is "pink" a different colour than (light) red?
No, it's a different word for it.
> Where does "white" end and "grey" begin?
When any amount of black is added to white.
> Where does "grey" end and "black" begin?
When the color is 100% black.
White and black are not the same as red, green, or blue. Tinting or shading a color with white or black does not change the color, it lightens or darkens it. That's not the same for RGB. Combining those results in other colors, regardless if a culture has a specific name for it.
But what does this mean? Only vantablack is black, everything else is grey?
For example, things can be small or big, a mouse is small, if you refine the vocabulary to include 10 size words, and the mouse is now minuscule, it is still small.
(The point being that, once you get to a somewhat ambiguous point (after two blue selections), you can say "oh, well, compared to the last one this is {opposite color}!", and it seems most people do that.)
For some, it might be blue -> blue -> blue -> blue -> green -> blue -> green -> blue.
Rather than asking "Is this blue or green?", it's "Does this look more blue to you, or more green to you?"
Because then your analogy becomes "Is Alice closer to Canada or Mexico?"
Denver is teal, the USA blue-green. Canada is Blue, and Mexico is green.
Their analogy is pretty on point.
Countries are not a continuum, they start and end at some specific line defined by constitutions, mutually agreed by neighbours (or disputed through war and diplomacy) Colours have no such incentive for strict unified definitions, so there is no point at which blue ends.
You're inability to wrap your head around the analogy is tantamount to.. Not being able to comprehend blue-green.
For example, when I saw the second color, "aqua" immediately popped into my mind. Aqua is literally defined as #00FFFF in RGB color space - no red, equal (max) parts blue and green. So it just felt like flipping a coin to me as it felt neither more blue nor more green.
I feel like using only RGB values to define 'aqua' is a bit reductive as it is merely a specification in a specific environment trying to render a type of color but with inherent limitations such as not being able to reproduce the whole spectrum, color accuracy on the display, etc. etc. there's a lot of other parameters along with your own individual color perception that goes beyond "it's equal values blue and green within the RGB color-space"
But then as I list all these things I think I arrive at the same conclusion as you, it feels like a dumb false choice haha
Even if aqua is neither more green or more blue, wouldn't it be interesting if when given the choice, the outcome leans toward green or blue to a statistically significant degree? or perhaps that there are differences in how it's perceived based on measurable factors like geography, wealth, height, weight, etc?
Collecting data is how we learn, and discover new things. Even if it seems dumb to you.
First I shifted the app to use P3 `oklch(.7066 .1611 $hue)` with range (150..210) centered on cyan at 180°, same as sRGB. No change, so it's not some sort of artifact of colorspaces. Then I upped it to 16 steps instead of 8. The window narrowed slightly, but the same first-then-the-rest shift kept happening. Finally I raised the random color static mask duration from 200ms to 5000ms. Scored 180 +/- 1. Huh. Makes sense, given the image persistence stuff I deal with.
So, for those seeing that same variability I'd recommend editing that first (local response override index-blah.js, search `, 200` replace `, 5000` by hand, reload page) to get a more stable result.
Pretty much impossible to prove the original question until we're able to see through someone else's eyes and brain (if we ever get there, that's probably the least of our philosophical worries :D)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Qualia
But it's way more fun when you apply it to abstract concepts like love, happiness, or fear!
"Wittgenstein's beetle" is the mind-blowing concept for today if you want to dive deeper into this rabbit hole :)
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hard_problem_of_consciousness
Note: I'm not sure this is formulated well, or even if I am able to articulate this correctly.
Look into aphantasia (lack of mental imagery), anendophasia (lack of inner voice).
At the end of the day what exactly are our senses? Are they simply our brains interpretation of the energies that surround us?
Apparently about 4.4% of the population experiences chromesthesia in which they have a blending of their senses and will see colors or shapes when hearing music.
My opinion is that it is impossible to know and if I had to bet I would bet that we all experience things slightly different. That is only based on the thought that from an evolutionary standpoint we already have many diverse traits from one another. It's another one of those philosophical thoughts we most likely could never answer.
ETA: But of course when I retook the test without my glasses, I went even greener.
Still an interesting experiment, but I would be cautious about drawing conclusions about anything from it.
I had actually a very hard time to answer the questions, needed to overlay most of the color with some mostly white / light gray window and only squint at the color around it to decide. In the end my result was 176, which is almost the exact turning point for most people (and that even while my monitor is set to be more cold than default; but like said I had whatever my monitor shows as "white" to compare; even that "white" is likely technically slightly blue-ish).
Color perception is anyway much more influenced by contrasts then anything else. (Likely similar to acoustic tones, which are very hard to name / locate absolutely than when comparing to some reference tone.)
Besides the things mentioned in the about popup, blue is AFAIK the color we have the most receptors for. So it's imho quite "natural" that most people perceive cyan—which is technically the exact middle—as blue-ish, and of course the color left to it, turquoise, is green-ish (and as it seems, for most people, the mentioned turning point).
my path was basically: ok def blue, ok cyan which would be "blue", greenish sea-foam? teal? ok now I wouldn't call these green Or blue . Then kinda bobbled the guess
crappy monitor aside, Feels like there's a combination of factors, some color fatigue from looking at a full screen saturated color and I think some "over thinking" the colors.
I have UV filters on my glasses and things really changed when I took them on of off. I was much greener with the UV filtering glasses on. I guess my eyes are not picking up on things somehow.
For you, turquoise is green."
Took it 3 times (90%, 85%, 87%). At least, I now know why sometimes I'm surprised that people call green things blue :)
To be honest, there should have been a "neither" category, because that was frustrating to classify a color that is clearly neither. But I understand the need for a binary choice for this experiment.
Turquoise `#40E0D0 ` feels green to me, while Dark Turquoise `#00CED1` , I can agree to consider as blue.
I would also trust the results more if it bounced you around a bit randomly rather than tried to center you in. It gets to a point where I don't really have confidence and I suspect the environment around me contributed a fair amount at that point.
Seem to get ~172.
A better interface would have been to just show the final spectrum pic and slide to where you think the separation is.
Guy Deutscher’s “Through the Language Glass” is a very readable history of linguistic relativism, including the long history of this experiment. It even has some colour plates to illustrate. Recommended.
https://www.penguin.co.uk/books/412264/through-the-language-...
I think the intent here is clear in context.
all my displays were so well defined out of the box, it wasnot worth it at all. Like you would need to use this particular profile for proper real industry printers to even have any benefit of it if even because all my displays were well calibrated.
I would argue that this would only make sense for highly profesional graphics designer and i don't think this experiment requires this level of granularity.
It would be much funnier, and also more insightful, if it didn't do this and let you contradict yourself.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blue%E2%80%93green_distinction...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blue_Sky_with_a_White_Sun
I like to think this may have had something to do with them having both blue and green in their political usage: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/St._Patrick%27s_blue
Is it the Rp2000 and Rp50000 that get mixed up? They seem obvious in that picture but it might be harder to tell them apart in low light.
The added complexity is their currency is like paper, so it wears, fades, tears, and marks. Furthermore, there are so many zeroes. Their sizes are all identical or similar. Different generations of the notes are in use, some better than others. Indonesians also use "," as the decimal indicator, and "." as the thousands separator; in practice, both are intermixed with no sense or reason, sometimes even in the same paragraph, even on banking websites <https://en.wikibooks.org/wiki/Talk:Indonesian/Lessons/Number...>, often due to misconfigured locale settings on computers (expect to see red spellcheck underlines on everything on Indonesian office computers).
<https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Banknotes_of_the_Indonesian_ru...>
<https://th.bing.com/th/id/R.a04f7812fd4ef0b773c7b081206bc28c...>
<https://img.freepik.com/premium-photo/new-rupiah-issued-2022...>
<https://h7.alamy.com/comp/WC177J/a-pile-of-crumpled-indonesi...>
<https://h7.alamy.com/comp/D17MR1/background-of-indonesia-mon...>
<https://h7.alamy.com/comp/JN9ANB/close-up-picture-of-indones...>
<https://h7.alamy.com/comp/2CXNYGJ/indonesia-money-isolated-b...>
<https://h7.alamy.com/comp/2KBJ4H6/semarang-indonesia-novembe...>
<https://h7.alamy.com/comp/2T13B4R/stock-photo-of-indonesian-...>
<https://h7.alamy.com/comp/2R5K0NE/new-series-of-rupiah-bankn...>
Also, I found that sometimes it looked like there were two colors. The top was green and bottom was blue. Maybe my monitor?
Yeah, so to me, tortoise is definitely blue.
Edit: typo tortoise -> turquoise
I got 80 which is close enough, I think it’s really only the extremes that are meaningful. I tried simply alternating green-blue etc and got 60. I think adding some randomness and taking more samples (more questions) would help - I was worried that the prior color left a residual effect as a relative comparison was easier than absolute comparison. The extra random samples could help give an idea of confidence in that middle zone.
Somewhat similar to a site I made a while ago, but for more "perception boundary" colors: https://theleo.zone/colorcontroversy/
However, I know enough about perception to know that this called for some hacking.
So as soon as I saw the second color I realized I needed to look at something else. So each time after choosing and seeing the next color I looked around quite a bit, inside and through the windows at the outside (I happen to be in a Hawaii, so blues and greens are abundant) before choosing and I noticed significantly different color perception after looking around, specifically, I had more confidence in whether it was blue or green.
I can imagine if you just stare at the colors and try to power through, you might get kinda irritated.
When I look at the green/blue boundary region on an HSV color wheel like the ones in this S/O thread [0], it appears as a white un-saturated region.
If I look at similar layouts in other colorspaces (e.g., something perceptually uniform like Lab) I don't generally see this white patch.
My question is: - I'm colorblind. Do other people also see a white patch there? - If this is a genuine problem with HSV, is there an explanation for why there's a hue angle that is unsaruated regardless of S value?
[0] https://stackoverflow.com/questions/62531754/how-to-draw-a-h...
I have a colorblindness simulator on my computer called Sim Daltonism and when I use that on the color wheel, it does indeed appear to have white, desaturated lines radiating from the center at those three angles. In the simulator, the one at 11:00 is the strongest, followed by 3:00, and the 7:00 one is faintest. My hunch is that the perceptually uniform color space samples you're looking at have more uniform brightness, so those boundaries blend in to the surrounding colors better. They look nicer to me too -- they still represent saturated, composite colors like teal, but just at a pleasant, harmonious brightness. It's very interesting to compare perception!
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CIE_1931_color_space
I think the bands you’re referring to are an artifact.
No idea why
Well... uhm, you may want to verify that claim.
Meaning, there is no absolute color, the brain just learns what things have the same color, and how similar or dissimilar they are in hue to other objects. And for example “cold” colors are cold because we associate them with cold things, not because of some independent “qualia”.
If I'm looking at a certain color of green illumination and then cover one eye then the other, my perception of that color shifts slightly. It's still green, but with one eye it is "brighter" than the other eye.
Cataract implant technology is moving very fast, and my data is about 5 years old, so YMMV.
Do they see everything beyond the initial green as a shade of blue?
--Edit--
My red/green colorblind father just got back me with this result:
> Your boundary is at hue 175, bluer than 68% of the population. For you, turquoise is green.
Problem is that it asks to categorize colors that to me are neither blue nor green
* HDR vs SDR mode
* Different monitors have different color replication ranges
* Monitor and OS color and brightness controls (brightness affects color perception)
* Interior lighting
* Monitor technology (LCD, OLED, etc)
Meaning even if a color was meant to be X, it just won't appear that way given the combinations above.
Practical ramifications: * Some of my 'black' shirts are blue when it's sunny * Popular desktop themes (solarized dark) have text that is completely unreadable
Is My Blue Your Blue? - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41430258 - Sept 2024 (527 comments)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blue%E2%80%93green_distinction...
Also, I wonder how the results are affected by my screen and environment. I’m on an iPhone in a dark room, with brightness turned all the way down and I currently have TrueTone enabled and Night Shift enabled.
I was bluer than x percent of the median. Night Shift mode reduces blue light exposure. At daytime with Night Shift off, I would surely be seeing the boundary earlier, as there would be more blue light transmitted by my screen.
I may have to repeat the attempt multiple times on different screens and lighting conditions (both indoors annd outside) and see if the results vary wildly or not. I think they will.
But with both eyes I got
> Your boundary is at hue 174, just like the population median. You're a true neutral.
I should test with one eye.
Not really sure how to interpret this. Where is "normal" on the curve?
I think a better way to standardize this without too much variance in color would be make the user denote on the screen where they are actually looking perpendicular to the screen and judge from that area.
It needs to interpolate between blue and green in the CIELAB color space.
very subtle changes in color after the first two. it also seems to be repeating blue -> green -> blue -> green, for me atleast.
Pretty sure I accidentally picked blue for a green once.
The data remains available. It was a TidyTuesday ("social data project") for 2025-07-08.[4] This response[5] looked at TFA. (This week's TT is ag tariffs.[9])
I just did a quick and sloppy search, so there's likely more out there. Curiously, I found AIMode and Bing/chat less immediately helpful than I'd have guessed.
Years ago I used the xkcd data for a prototype web interactive for kids, which shader filtered video to selected colors... but it was overlapping rather than a partition, and I'd never leave out cyan. Hmm, maybe a vibe coding target.
[1] https://blog.xkcd.com/2010/05/03/color-survey-results/ [2] https://www.datapointed.net/2010/06/xkcd-color-name-strata/ [3] https://luminoso.com/the-color-cloud-an-interactive-visualiz... [4] https://github.com/rfordatascience/tidytuesday/blob/main/dat... [5] https://jofrhwld.github.io/blog/posts/2025/07/2025-07-09_col... Off topic: [9] https://github.com/rfordatascience/tidytuesday/blob/main/dat...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Teal
Not much sense for the evolutionary machinery to keep the whole backend the same, but diverge in the perception part.
Like if im 75% on the green transition, how do i use this information.
isn't turquoise exactly (50%) between the two?
This has nothing at all to do with colour perception, or, if actual differences in perception are involved, this test fails to distinguish those from individual differences in assignment to linguistic categories.
EDIT: To actually test something like this, you need to make an assumption that cannot easily be tested or supported by evidence.
E.g. say we could all agree that, generally, blue + orange is a more pleasant pairing than blue + green. One might then imagine a series of images using orange + varying interpolations between blue and green, with the prompt being "is this combination of colours more or less aesthetically pleasing than the last". The average cutpoint could then be interpreted as a subjective judgement of where e.g. teals become "more blue", from an aesthetic / complementary standpoint. But this test does nothing of the sort.
The first color was obvious to me, as it was designed to be (it even tells you if you intentionally misclick). But at the very next color, the first "test color", I literally face palmed and said "oh my god" out loudly.
It was so, so hard for me to decide. I really just wanted to pick a non-existent "teal" option. Both "blue" or "green" felt wrong and equally right at the same time.
It just got harder from there. At the end, it told me that my threshold is "bluer than 80% of the population", but honestly, I don't think that's really true in my case. I was so ambivalent, my choices really felt random to me very quickly.
I think this would work better if the hues jumped around a bit instead of blatantly triangulating, so that you wouldn't be biased by your prior semection.
I want to say that shifted my score a lot. But every time I play I get a pretty different score, even on the same screen calibration. So, uh...
There's teal, cyan, aquamarine, etc...It's such a uniquely american notion to force someone to categorize something (incorrectly) into one of 2 things. Almost a comical parallel to the political system.
EDIT: in general, blue is a pretty fascinating color. yes, many cultures have a somewhat blurry distinction between blue and green. Some others seem to differentiate shades of blue that others don't (i.e. in Russian "голубой" and "синий" refer to distinct colors but in English those would be just shades of blue). I guess there's something about photons in that energy band that messes with perception. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Non-photo_blue