Count the colors, the answer
OK, here we go, the answer to the ‘Count the colors’ quiz of the day from last Tuesday:
In total 10 people commented, five of them said ‘3’, four thought it would be ‘4’ and one thought the correct answer is ‘5’.
The correct answer is: 3!!
Great, half of you were correct, it’s apparently a bunch of smart people reading this blog! 😉 . I am pretty sure however that not everyone was correct for the right reasons! 😉
Let’s first start with the original picture:
No one can deny that you see 4 colors; two smaller stripes (orange and magenta) and two bigger spirals (blue and green).
Well, let’s now first remove the small orange stripe:
The bigger stripes ‘change’ in color it seems, and become a little closer in relation than before. So, let’s now remove the magenta:
Wow!!
It is now clear that the ‘blue’ and green are actually the same color, in reality there is no blue in this picture!! The actual RGB (RedGreenBlue) color code is r=0, g=255, b=150, so mostly green with some blue in it.
Another thing that helps in tricking your brain is that the orange stripe crosses the green spiral, but not the ‘blue’ one and the magenta stripe crosses the ‘blue’ spiral, but not the green one.
Nice to see how you can be tricked, ah?
It shows that you cannot trust what you see even with your own eyes. Colors are not what they appear, shapes are not what they appear, objects are not what they appear…the next time someone swears they saw Elvis, or a UFO (that could actually be true!), or a ghost, show them this picture.
Hehe, what you see is definitely not what you get! 😉
Pfffffffffff… ik had het ook inderdaad bijna wiskundig begokt..
Interestingly twisted principle of mixing of colours! I would have guessed i saw 4 colours so i zoomed the picture and checked with the colour-picker (trust, but verify principle 🙂 ). When zoomed, you can also see easier how it works.
And one more point to Raymond’s explanation: while the actual colours on the picture are “magenta”, “orange” and “blueish-green” (cyan?), if you look from a longer distance, you see nice RGB spirals = “red”, “green” and “blue” – also three, but different colours :-).