What the Hex? Guess the color. | Hacker News Reader

What the Hex? Guess the color.

yizzle.com

174 pointsSlyShy43 comments

A timer would be interesting on this to make it into a real "game." Almost anyone with knowledge of color and hex color notation can work these out eventually.. the skill, I'm thinking, is in doing it quickly - a bit like reading sheet music.

That said, the 48 edition is crazy. If you can get a few in a row on that, hats off to you.

I hate timed games. Won't buy them. This is a game as it is. Of course it could have modes to please everybody.

I don't like timed games much either but in the lower levels and with no time (or time-like) restrictions this seems like a puzzle rather than a "game" to me.

That is, where a puzzle is something that can be "solved" without a time dependency. If I asked you to do 834 + 277 with no time limit, that's a puzzle. If you had to get as close as possible in 5 seconds, that's a game. Thanks for making me think about this though, I could well be wrong, but that's the difference as I see it.

I can get it in 2 picks on the 48 without doing too much tinking most of the time. Once I got unluckly with 3 that I couldn't tell apart without juxtaposing them though :(

I managed to freak out my wife by one-shotting four or five of the 48 puzzles in a row. She's a web designer :)

You can generally get them by saying, okay, predominantly red and blue, and is more light than dark.

Some color distributions are very difficult though. I can generally get 4 out of every 5 in the 48 difficulty.

I couldn't resist to try but by using Firebug it is easy to solve all of them in one go. Just inspect the <li> items and Firebug will tell the color... Bit lame, but this is hackernews.

You're only cheating yourself!

With no knowledge of how hex colors work, I'm going to see how long it takes to figure it out by playing this.

Here are some tips: the first two numbers/letters stand for red, the second two stand for green, and the last two stand for blue. In hex, A is 10, B is 11, and so on, up to F is 15. One non-intuitive thing to keep in mind is that with light yellow is made by mixing red and green.

Edit: Fixed my mistake, at first I said F was 16.

Thanks.

I basically have this figured out, didn't see your comment until after.

The first hint was when Fs popped up in the first digit, which would make the color pretty red, so I thought F might mean "red". Red is the last color on the color spectrum and it was the highest letter that ever appeared.

So my first hypotheses was that every successive digit modified the previous digit, adding an amount of a certain color. But that didn't make sense because I knew FFFFFF was white. If my hypotheses were true, then it would be red.

I realized right there that I'm adding at least three different colors together. How did I realize this? You add colors to make white. From there I was looking at splitting the hex color into different pieces, and if each piece is at its highest intensity then you will have white (FFFFFF). F being the "highest" influencer of a color. I knew the first to be red.

I clicked a bunch, taking note of where the Fs popped up and the color. I was thrown off by second "digit" Fs. After figuring out which digits didn't influence the color much, I basically had it.

It wasn't hard to figure out. I'd like to know how long it takes someone who doesn't know that hex is sixteen.

Note: This really only took me about ten minutes.

See, this is exactly the sort of thing kids should be doing in their very first Science class. Not blindly being filled with derived facts with no explanation as to how they were derived, but rather giving them (simple) problems without any sort of solution method, and having them find possible methods on their own. (And the problems don't have to be from the natural world—they can simply be patterns, like this one is.)

After a few hundred, the test would be to look at all the ways they solved all the problems, and come up with a generalized method for problem-solving. Once they derive the scientific method, they pass—and get to learn all the things previous scientists found out using the method. I imagine it would forever change their attitude about those facts—they'd either be eager to build on them with their own experiments, or to know how they were derived and replicate/refute them :)

Sounds good, except that relearning everything in Science, from first principles, might take a little while. Some grounding in experimental methods is good, learning how to learn from other people's experiments is much better, and faster.

I agree, but I think that most problems have to be from the real world to keep non-geek kids interested. This method is actually being experimented by a math teacher named Dan Meyer. Here it's his TED talk http://www.ted.com/talks/dan_meyer_math_curriculum_makeover....

Also, if there is one color that is really strong

     e.g. #4ea87f
     R - 4e
     G - a8 (This is a lot higher (numerically) than the others)
     B - 7f

Then you can make an assumption that the color is heavy in that color.

So, the color above would be very green with more blue than red added into it.

F = 15

Good catch. Thanks.

Let us know how you get on I'd be interested to know how naturally intuitive hex colours are.

I wish I didn't know hex notation so I could figure it out by myself like you did :)

Brilliant game. Just perfect for the iPad, with its touch interface and excellent color accuracy.

There's an Android port too.

http://www.craig-russell.co.uk/android-game-what-the-hex/

I love this thing. I enjoy guessing colors in my CSS anyways, so this is a natural <strike>addition</strike> addiction.

Suggestions:

- Add a timer

- Add total scoring

- Allow "new game" to happen without a new request

- Make the wrongfully selected color still be there but x-it out or something so you can keep it as reference

- Hex numbers in uppercase and preferably in a mono spaced font

Please :)

Then share with friends and create a multi-player platform. =)

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I'm only getting that on levels 10 and 48. 9 and below seem to work.

awww me3 ... I was enjoying that

Nice! Any plans under all this coolness?

FYI flickr started out like this, except with random untagged images. Catherina is doing it again with Hunch.

I'm curious is this is bait for something bigger :P

I thought flickr started with game neverending?

Neverending was a competely different thing, which they scrapped to start flickr. Maybe it had some influence?

but as far as I remember, flickr was just a page with a single image loading at a time and users would type in a field to correctly tag it. Like how captcha works today.

Bradley Horowitz explained it well in a conference.

I thought it was based on photo sharing within the game itself...

Some are easy, just look for the green or red block, but on level 48, this #70eb7e color is hard. Any with simular values for the RGB, it gets much more difficult.

It would be nice if it the game also did HSB, which I think is a more natural way to work with color.

Really? What's the natural meaning of the hue number?

Hue is the angular dimension in the cylindrical color geometry. It starts with the primary color red at 0deg, moving through the primary color green at 120deg, and through the blue primary at 240deg before finally wrapping back to red at 360deg. The cylindrical color geometry is easy to visualize in one's mind. For more see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HSV_color_space

But surely both the location of the "zero" hue and the directionality of where it goes from there are both arbitrary? I didn't know red was 00 until you mentioned it.

It makes sense in terms of physics. Start at 0, red, the beginning of the visible spectrum, and the number increases along with the wavelength, all the way through violet, the other end of the visible spectrum.

Sadly, after hue goes through violet, it then disappears into magenta, which isn't in fact a colour on the spectrum at all, before arriving back at red when it reaches 1.

Presumably hue has a non-linear correspondence with frequency?

I just love it

gay

I have never known a webpage to have a sexual preference.

For the record, I didn't write this. One of my friends must have played a trick on me.

Heh, I thought it seemed off. For what it's worth, I didn't downvote you (the comment didn't bother me either way). I just couldn't help being a smartass.

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