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Show HN: Do you know RGB?

Show HN: Do you know RGB?

38 comments

·June 24, 2025

neilk

I like it, but when you make your guess the mystery color should change to the color it describes, not to green or red. You should use some other aspect to indicate success - shape, motion, font, anything other than color. You already have it shaking for an incorrect guess, so that’s good.

joemi

Yeah that green tripped me up.

arcanemachiner

Definitely don't make the game end dafter one wrong guess. At least give me some lives or something, damn. Or, better yet, just let me play to the end, then give me my score.

fsckboy

that's not really what you want, what you want is for the starting of a new game to be automatic and not require extra clicks.

the way I'm suggesting (which is what the game is with extra clicks) is a game of "what's my longest streak of correct guesses" which actually makes your score look better than keeping your losses around.

PaulHoule

I feel that way. Also there are many cases where I can eliminate two choices as obviously wrong but can’t tell the difference between two similar shades. I wouldn’t feel bad getting disqualified for a gross error but when it is two shades of bluish-green it doesn’t seem fair.

Another possibility is to give it more of a tournament feel where the early cases are easy and the last ones are hard so I get disqualified at 15/20 (webdev and photographer who does gfx programming for fun) but a real goldeneye could go further. 3/20 does not represent my skill.

joemi

Odd, I only got one wrong, and it gave me a 10/20 score at the end. Is the scoring not 1-to-1?

edit: Oh, I see. Once you get one wrong the game ends immediately, but the score includes the full 20 rounds that you're supposed to get through.

null

[deleted]

stared

Thank you for sharing!

However, you both ask about colors and use color for confirmation. This unfortunately is both confusing and makes a not nice overlap of one modality used for two things.

Quick solution: just use the correct color. Use other modality (e.g. shape V/X or text "Correct!" vs "Wrong!")

skykooler

It would be nice if this told you upfront how many questions there were - after sixteen with nothing changing I figured it was probably endless but apparently there are twenty?

susam

First try: 16/20

https://imgur.com/a/c0yUOlw

Excellent game!

maxwellito

Good job! That’s really good! Oh damn I didn’t realised it was you!

Dear HN community, susam built the GuessMyRGB game which was a huge inspiration for this game. Please take the time to play it!!

https://susam.net/myrgb.html

dang

That one had a thread last year, for anyone interested:

Guess my RGB - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39882018 - March 2024 (144 comments)

freeqaz

Here is another one my friend shared with me that's interesting. The time constraint adds some excitement! https://color.method.ac/

aezart

Interesting that sometimes a washed out color will look darker than a pure color, even though there's more light overall.

dmd

I’m so confused. This is something people know? I mean, I can work it out from first principles knowing how color mixing works, but it sounds like people just … know them? I’ve been programming for almost 40 years and it would never have occurred to me to memorize this sort of thing.

tshaddox

I doubt anyone has many of them truly memorized. It's more like having the ability to quickly see each hex character and understand roughly what percentage that is, then quickly visualize the resulting color. My methodology playing this is to just convert each hex character to high, medium, or low, so you end up with something like "high red, medium blue, low green."

fsckboy

>I mean, I can work it out from first principles knowing how color mixing works

did you try it? if you can work it out from first principles because you know how color mixing works, you should get a perfect score; that's the game. If you don't get a perfect score, you need to reinspect what you think you know about color mixing and even the first principles.

dmd

Yes, I got a perfect score. It just took me several minutes, whereas coworkers of mine got 15+ in just a few seconds.

RheingoldRiver

Just know them no. Able to sanity check that an RGB value is the color it's supposed to be yes sometimes. It's not the most useful skill because you almost always get a swatch now, but sometimes being able to have some idea of how it'll look (should it be dark or light, grey or intense color) saves me 10 seconds here and there.

I like playing guess-RGB games every now and then because it improves the skill, but at the same time I find them really stressful haha.

alpha_squared

I got 14/20 on my first try just by knowing how the color mixing works. A few simple rules:

- Higher values mean brighter colors

- The closer the individual colors are to each other, the closer to "gray" it looks

- R + G = Yellow, R + B = Fuchsia, G + B = Teal

siddboots

I’d say this is firmly about knowing how colour mixing works, and not about memorising.

meindnoch

4096 colors is not too much to memorize.

AlienRobot

In the English language, they call it "red"

In the programming language, we call it "f00"

4096 words for colors!

fsckboy

f00 is 3840

bbx

Very fun game. Got 15/20. I think I'd do better at an HSL version.

2earth

Couldn't get above 3 for numerous tries, after 5 minutes or so managed to get to 18! I learned a lot playing this (and reflected on things I already "knew" but never reflected on why). Thanks!

ryandrake

I tried about 5 times and never got more than 3 right. It would be better if they started out a little easier and then increased the difficulty. Currently it seems random. At any time you might get three nearly identical green boxes and it’s game over.

AnimalMuppet

Off topic, but this seems like a decent place to ask:

Has anyone else noticed the weird new grey color that automobiles have in the last year or so? Does anyone know how to describe that color? Can anyone explain how it is different from previous greys in RGB terms? Or even in paint color terms?

LorenDB

Make sure to disable any dark mode extensions or the colors will not show up correctly.