What colour is "lavender"?
Find the colour of a word one slider at a time. Each choice changes a single dimension, which is how Gibbs Sampling with People turns human judgments into a sampler.
Practice mode Nothing you do here leaves this browser. We plan to open this as a citizen-science study once our ethics amendment is approved. How taking part will work
Ask someone what colour “lavender” is and you get a word back. Ask them to adjust one thing at a time and you can get the colour itself.
Each trial gives you a single slider that changes one property of the colour, its hue, saturation or lightness, and leaves the other two alone. You pick the value that best fits the word. The next trial moves a different property, starting from your choice. A long run of these easy choices behaves like a Gibbs sampler, an algorithm statisticians use to explore a probability distribution. Here the distribution is the colours a word brings to mind.
Here your 15 choices form one chain of your own. In the study each chain had 30 steps, and each step was made by a different person.
Your palette
Passing it on
In Gibbs Sampling with People the chain is passed between people: each trial is done by someone new, starting from the previous person’s colour. The end of the chain is then a colour shared by many minds rather than one. As in the study, the slider sometimes runs backwards, and here it also starts at a random place, so its position gives nothing away. The colour wheel stays grey until your chain is done for the same reason.
The same trick works wherever people can judge what they see or hear: the paper also used it to find which chords sound most pleasant, which voices sound angry or happy, and, paired with an image-generating network, faces that look trustworthy or intelligent. Associations like these vary across languages and cultures, which is why we want many people to play.
Where this comes from
Related work
- Using Gibbs Sampling with People to characterize perceptual and aesthetic evaluations in multidimensional visual stimulus space The method applied to aesthetic judgments of images.
- Studying the effect of globalization on color perception using multilingual online recruitment and large language models How colour words map onto colours across languages, compared with language models.
- Timbral effects on consonance disentangle psychoacoustic mechanisms and suggest perceptual origins for musical scales Gibbs sampling with people over chords, finding the most pleasant three-note chords.
- Estimating subjective probability distributions Why chains of human choices reveal people's mental distributions.