from Hacker News

Online Color Challenge

by ibrad on 6/11/14, 5:56 PM with 43 comments

• by poopchute on 6/11/14, 7:02 PM

  I already know that I'm colourblind, but if anyone else is curious what those results would look like; Here ya go: http://imgur.com/a/OgnuM

  Something of interest that I noticed is the fairly constant gap between areas of low colour acuity

• by mjs7231 on 6/11/14, 6:23 PM

  Perfect score! Test takes a bit of time, I got bored about half way through. I wonder how I would do on not a nice a monitor.

• by agf on 6/12/14, 1:11 AM

  Interesting test. I got a 4, much better than I expected, on my RMBP.

  Anyone else here take the XKCD color survey back in 2010: http://blog.xkcd.com/2010/05/03/color-survey-results/

  I was presented with an awful lot of colors I didn't have a better word for than "tan", "beige", "green", etc, so I expected that my "color acuity score" would be poor.

  Looks like I was having trouble without something to compare to, and having trouble naming, rather than having trouble identifying differences between shares. Good to know!

• by PhasmaFelis on 6/11/14, 9:32 PM

  The scoring is weird. It places your final result on a scale from 0 to 99, but just hitting Submit without changing anything produces a score in the 800-1100 range, and my "Highest score for your gender and age range" is 1520. Why doesn't the scale reflect actual values? How could someone score substantially worse than random?

  ...I think something is wrong with their best/worst scores, actually. About 80% of the age/gender brackets say the best is 0 and the worst is 1520, and that consistency is weird to begin with, but some have really dramatic outliers. Women aged 50-59 range from negative 162 to 410,378,090!

• by joshvm on 6/11/14, 8:27 PM

  Perfect colour vision, actually quite surprised at that - some of the shades in the middle were very hard to distinguish. Performed on a 5 year old Macbook - assuming my Dell IPS panel make it easier.

• by aaroninsf on 6/11/14, 10:45 PM

  Is it just me, or is this for many people more a test of

  a) your capacity to stare at a screen without tearing up, blurring, etc.

  and

  b) the quality and color profile both native and gamut-corrected etc. of your monitor?

  I swear this is much more a test of my current monitor settings vs. ambient light conditions, than anything serious about my own color perception.

  A physical version with color chips and the option to work under a variety of lights (LED, halogen, CF, incandescent, sunlight...) at whim would be way more revealing.

  But yeah, harder to code in JS.

• by zacinbusiness on 6/11/14, 11:51 PM

  I scored a 12 on an uncalibrated laptop display (late 2010 MacBook Air) so I don't think that's too poor for my age range (29). Still, I would have liked to see some median scores.

  My results: http://screencast.com/t/s5ohpINp

  Also, by the end of the process I felt like I was going to be sick, not sure if it was the brightness (my eyes are extremely sensitive to light and I normally keep the brightness at 1 bar but I had it at full brightness for this).

• by otoburb on 6/12/14, 1:20 AM

  91. Still not sure whether that's good or bad given my age range.

  EDIT: Based on a brain damage study with 48 patients and 48 healthy controls "a total error score between 20 and 100 was taken as the range of normal competence for discrimination."[1]

  [1] http://www.perceptionweb.com/abstract.cgi?id=v990416, "Scoring efficiency on the Farnsworth - Munsell 100-Hue test after brain damage"

• by Cerium on 6/12/14, 12:40 AM

  I have taken this test several times over the years. I can score perfectly but if I make a mistake it is in the blue greens.

  I have fun running different sorting algorithms on the tiles. The trick to getting a perfect score is doing a pass where you switch every pair of adjacent tiles. This will double the color delta on the edges if the tile is correct and halve the delta if the position was wrong. I always catch at least a blue or two on this pass.

• by morbius on 6/11/14, 9:09 PM

  I got a 4. Pretty terrible result for somebody as young as I am, but I suppose myopia and the the spectral aberration caused by eyeglasses makes it harder to distinguish colors.

  http://i.imgur.com/uLRW0YI.png

• by MisterBastahrd on 6/11/14, 8:06 PM

  I remember this test! I outscored the entire art department at my workplace, with an uncalibrated monitor to boot. The worst scorer? The art director. He clocked in with a score of 37. Luckily, his job has a lot more to do with layout than color precision.

• by cessor on 6/11/14, 11:02 PM

  I liked this test. I am running a calibrated display, so I am assuming the display is not a factor. Remember to relax your eyes frequently, starring at a color for too long tires the cone cells and might affect your test results as a fatigue effect.

• by monitron on 6/11/14, 7:08 PM

  This thing again!

  I'm red-green colorblind, and got a 90. Ouch. It looked pretty good to me!

• by nardi on 6/11/14, 10:56 PM

  I really hate how they show lowest and highest scores, and no median/mean/percentiles, or anything at all that would help you decide whether your score was good or bad.

• by antipod on 6/11/14, 7:15 PM

  I got a perfect score (zero). The trick is to blur your vision.

• by lisch on 6/11/14, 8:35 PM

  I love stuff like this. Reminds you that what you believe is "true" is rarely what other people may believe.

• by morl0ck on 6/11/14, 7:54 PM

  Perfect ColorIQ http://grab.by/xGhe

• by spacefight on 6/11/14, 8:39 PM

  It's still beyond my understanding, on how Pantone could copyright their colorsets...

• by OneOneOneOne on 6/11/14, 6:28 PM

  Is using an LCD monitor "cheating?"

  I got a perfect score but am neither artistic nor fashionable.

• by kefka on 6/11/14, 8:28 PM

  Hmm. I got 8

  http://imgur.com/R4LkI3s

• by lgmspb on 6/11/14, 6:52 PM

  It gets trickier around 0.25 and 0.75, i wonder why?

• by adestefan on 6/11/14, 8:30 PM

  Missed 4 in a row right in the green section.

• by menacestudio on 6/11/14, 8:43 PM

  Got a 6.