I wish this had a "I can't tell" option. A few of the really hard ones I got right, but I'd say it was more of a lucky guess than a genuine ability to discriminate the difference.
Quite. With the odds being 1 to 3 you'll pick the right one when you have to click one at random to proceed, the results get skewed.
If you repeat the test a few times, it'll average out.
That's why there's 20 rounds I guess. If you could just press "all the same" it wouldn't have to be as many
Oh god this is colorblindness torture
Is it sleep deprivation or do the disks actively change colour and swap places?
I think this must be a low light optical illusion - something to do with different sensitivity in center of eyes vs peripheral. Will try again in the daytime.
19/20 - <https://i.imgur.com/GplfQbO.png>
By the way, I keep Night Shift enabled all the time: <https://i.imgur.com/LGkSlJZ.png>. I don't know how much it matters in a game like this.
See also <https://susam.net/myrgb.html> for a colour guessing game I wrote last year.
This is from the creator of the ScienceClic YouTube channel [0]:
“As part of the next video, which will be out in a few weeks, l'd like to invite you to take part in an experiment about color perception. If you don't experience color blindness, l'd greatly appreciate it if you could take this test. Feel free to try it as many times as you like, think about it as a game!”
I was wondering if it got harder or if it's just random:
function generateColors(difficulty, blacklist) {
...
let sample = Math.floor(Math.min(Math.max(0, 1-Math.pow(1-difficulty, 1.5)), .99)*5);
let distance = (5 - sample)/5;
...
}
function setupRound(blacklist) {
...
const data = generateColors(currentRound/totalRounds, blacklist);
...
}
round# difference
0-- 2 5
3-- 5 4
6-- 9 3
10--13 2
14--20 1
I appreciate https://lucb1e.com/randomprojects/js/testformula.html, it's a cool idea!
Happy to hear, though note the file is without l (lowercase L) in the end (I guess autocorrupt is to blame here?). Fun fact: if you remove the filename, it'll show you all the crap in that directory, listing this file as being last modified in 2015-09-27. If past performance is an indicator, it should be stable to use for the next ten years as well :D
17 out of 20. Was super easy until #10 and I had to stop and think more carefully (which was actually my first mistake), and then I got #14 and #15 wrong. The score was about what I expected, though - would've been surprised if it was <15 correct.
I wonder how much of this would come down to screen calibration / color accuracy? If everything's consistently off in 1 direction I guess not much, but I would imagine certain shades might appear effectively the same on some cheaper screens?
Shouldn't there also be a few "control" challenges sprinkled in where all three are the same color and there's no "right" answer? If the test is implemented well and/or there is no human bias (either from the previous question or from the positioning of the circles), then you'd expect to see a uniform distribution of answers on the control. If there is bias (e.g. some innate preference for the top circle (say)), that should get adjusted for in the final analysis.
Would be interesting to get some basic analysis of my results. From a glance it appeared that the ones I missed (6) tended towards red. The low saturation ones and green ones I found to be easiest, but was there any actual significance of the distribution of my errors? Simply too small a set to say?
I got the same number wrong but I've passed every Ishihara test ever thrown at me. I did this test on a cheap mobile that's not calibrated, so it's anyone guess what its gamma and transfer curves are like.
One should only take such tests seriously if one's using a properly calibrated monitor and it's viewed under ideal viewing conditions.
Interesting! All of my misses were blue leaning a bit towards violet.
Not bad, I only missed 2 on purple and 2 on brown. It seems those laser safety and solar eclipse goggles do indeed work!
19/20. The first many were very obvious. I missed #14 and I think right around there I started to slow down because the differences were getting smaller. Looking away and then coming back helped, I think. It seemed like if you look at them too long, whichever circle you're looking at seems to shift color and it becomes really hard to discern the difference.
Toward the end, I think the confounding effect of the afterimages of the discs was bigger than the difference between the discs. (That is, when looking at the three discs in turn, the effect of the afterimage of disc 1 on judging disc 2, etc.)
It could rearrange the discs each time to avoid this issue, perhaps just flipping the pattern vertically each time.
I noticed this too. I did much better covering up two of the disks and looking at them one at a time, or comparing pairs of disks.
Aww. 16/20. Seems like this is the worst score anyone's posted, other than the color-blind guy who tied me.
How much of the result is vision accuracy and how much is dependant of the display?
As I've mentioned, you can't take this seriously unless you've a properly calibrated monitor.
Calibrating a monitor is intended to ensure that colors on your monitor closely match colors on an ideal reference monitor. That's not the same thing as ensuring that two different colors on the same monitor actually show up differently; that's a much looser quality standard, because even a badly mis-calibrated monitor may still show both colors as distinct wrong colors.
I would only expect poor calibration to break this test for colors near the edge of the display's gamut, or if there's a drastic-enough shift that the color space's lack of perceptual uniformity means a numerical difference that should have been visible ends up in a different part of the color space where that same numerical difference is not perceptible.
What stood out a lot in this exercise is that when looking at, versus near a disc, its luminance (or maybe the color as well) is perceived as changing. Almost the same i have when staring at not too bright stars, they seem to disappear when staring directly on them.
And related, I once had an 'eye migrane'. During that half an hour, the figures of a clock disappeared the moment i looked at them.
I experienced this too. IIRC the brightness-sensitive rod cells are more concentrated in your peripheral vision while your central vision has more colour-sensitive cone cells. This makes the centre of your vision less sensitive to dim objects, so you can see them only while looking indirectly (and they "disappear" when staring at them)
Another related effect is flickering of badly designed lighting only in my peripheral vision. When looking directly at the lights they look fine, but when the lights are in my peripheral vision they appear to flash distractingly. I think the peripheral vision is optimised to detect fast changes/movements. At least, that makes sense based on evolution.
I'm curious how the eye migraine is related. I had one many, many years ago. It was a smallish (palm at arm's length) oval in the center of my vision that looked like snow on an analog TV, accompanied by a feeling of overwhelmed by all the colors of the products on the shelves (I was in a grocery). It stuck around for about half an hour for me as well.
I've also had eye floaters which cause things to distort and can be hard to see through. For about 6 months I had a large one in the center of my left eye vision, which was a bit scary when I discovered I might not see a car reflected in my wing mirror.
I’ve had visual migraines ever since I started training hard with weights. Played sports in High School and never had one, but suddenly I’m doing CrossFit in my late 30s and an hour after a workout I get these sparkly jagged lines in my vision (both eyes!). It took a while to even be able to describe them, let alone figure out what they were. Thankfully there’s no pain and they clear up after a while, but I have noticed since this all started that I’m also a bit more sensitive to screen brightness. That HDR emoji article from the other day was kind of triggering.
I had visual migraines for years, and was thankful they weren't full-blown... until I started getting headaches that lasted 18+ hours (pretty sure they're migraines). Now I'm just thankful I don't have multi-day-long ones.
Sounds like symptoms of impending retinal detachment - ex discussion https://www.reddit.com/r/myopia/comments/o7rhi3/retinal_deta...
Similar experience. What surprised me: sometimes the odd-one-out was really quick/easy to see, and other times it took much longer & I thought "at the end, they'll say all disks were the same color".
Got 14/20
This seems to be a test of the color accuracy of a display. I got 17/20 and the 3 I got wrong were the last 3. I did this on my iPad Pro. For the last ones, they all looked the same to me.
I wondered whether any display issues caused some to have no difference. I wonder whether it could somehow do a test to be sure your display is up to the task. It's annoying not knowing whether it's a visual limitation or hardware issue that causes wrong ones.
11 of 20.
Interesting. I only got 15/20, and previously considered myself "above average" at colour distinction tests but based on other replies that's not an especially good score. I'll try again, going more carefully.
I have poor color discrimination, but excellent flicker detection (?). This last skill was discovered by the senior devs when I was doing GPU driver debug, and “we” were looking for an extremely transient high-refresh rate tile clear issue. The issue only occurred at 120Hz (or higher) refresh rate with solid clear color on a large screen, with nearly identical colors. About one 4x8 pixel tile every minute or so. That was a boring few days, let me tell you.
Ah, yes, 19/20 the second time (only the last one wrong).
The first time I kept my eyes fixed in the same place roughly in the middle which clearly wasn't a good idea. On the second attempt I glanced between each circle in turn, trying to discern the difference over two points in time rather than two points in space.
Was way easier after deactivating the Android night light.
13 out of 20 for me. Would've been 14 but I misclicked on one early on.
20/20 (once) - I found that by looking at the edge between the border and color sample that I could usually tell pretty quickly.
7/20. I'm also red green colorblind so that likely has something to do with it. Could also be the phone screen I'm looking at.
With phone screen on full brightness I was able to get 14/20.
I think it matters what colors you looked at in the previous screen. It takes a while for the eyes to adjust.
14/20. Increased brightness to full, turned off blue light filter (aka night light on Android), zoomed in, scrolled the circles up and down to dissipate after image from eyes, 19/20.
Not sure what to make of this. Most looked the same and I couldn't tell if I was really seeing a difference or not. 12/20. (And I am color blind, so not sure if that has a lot to do with it or not.)
17/20
Wonder how big an influence the type and quality of screen has. Do OLEDS give an advantage for instance?
18/20 correct, I think I did well? Interesting how sometimes it's more of a feeling than an objective perception.
At the end it says I can play again, because it'll generate more data. But for what?
It'd be cool to see some stats, or learn a bit more about what I just did...
17 out of 20. good enough for me. actually, i wonder how many of the 17 were just lucky guesses haha! they mention data in the end screen, i wonder if it will be made public (so i can see where in the bell curve i sit)
My 14/20 went up to 18/20 after I turned up my phone brightness.
Black text on dark grey background, sorry, that's too hard to read.
It's true that white text would be more readable on that background: https://www.achecks.org/apca-accessible-colour-contrast-chec...
The dark-mode browser extension I use changes the text from black to white on that page, which I hadn't noticed wasn't the original text color until you pointed out the poor readability of the black text.
Your display might have a more serious gamma problem, because the contrast ratio there isn't horrible on the displays I've tried. Or maybe your display is just set too dim for your viewing conditions. The test probably does legitimately need the neutral grey background.
I think this would be more fun if it started out easier, but most importantly if it gave you some real world stats at the end, such as how you compare to others, or whether you're colorblind etc.
I found it did start out really easy, getting harder half way. You might have some form of colour blindness (or a really bad monitor).
I got 17/20, but then again I have a high-end NEC PA302W hardware color-calibrated monitor.
18/20 on an uncalibrated "gamer" spec display with windows' late night colour yellowing turned on. I'd argue spec/calibration isn't maybe that important, as long as a difference can be spotted.
18/20 on an iPhone – they’ve have Display P3 wide colour for many years.
19/20 the neon blue one really messed with my head and kind of hurt to look at for some reason, so I am not surprised I got it wrong.
19/20 somehow on my first try. Near the end was just tiny differences in saturation or brightness.
Browser > right click on the dot > inspect the RGB numbers
The first line on the page says
> Click the disk that's a different color. Use your eyes only!
Inspecting the color is cheating.
Clever.
How do I know my screen can display all of these correctly? I tried on three different screens, one of which I know is bad, and got 16, 16, 18. Is those two mistakes the error margin of the screen if my eyes are fine, or much more likely to be the error margin of my eyes?
For those reporting scores: please also report device type, like LCD/OLED, or which phone model if applicable. Tweakers.net has a large database of screen color measurements. As mentioned in e.g. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43746400, it can make quite a difference
My 18 score was on an Oppo Reno8, the 16 score on the not-known-bad screen is some ~2008 display. On the former, Tweakers reports an average color error of 3.42 ΔE2000, 9.58 ΔEITP, or 2.60 ΔE2000 if white is excluded
20/20 but I've always done well on these color tests. I had to pause for a second and look with my head twisted though so the afterimage of the previous color didn't affect the next one.
Your score: 20 out of 20. Mistakes: 0
I got 16/20 but I am colorblind and tried it on a small 8+ year old laptop screen in dubious lighting conditions :)
Tried it briefly, upto 6. Got all right. Gonna do more later.
Need some interesting optical illusion type of posts on HN!
Escher's creations are cool. Our chemistry teacher introduced us to them in school.