A few weeks earlier, the following image was posted on DogHouse Diaries. Randall Munroe, from xkcd created an online survey and asked internauts the name of random colors. 220 000 people took the test, giving many interesting results (see here).

How men/women see colors

The most interesting thing from this survey is the image underneath, making a map of color names. We see that there is no bijection between the RGB space and human language, either or french, english or whatever. This mean that given a specific RGB value, we can find the corresponding name, but from a single name (pink for instance), hundreds of color values are valid.

Map of color names

This would be an interesting approach to look at, in arts and artificial intelligence. Computers do not have the fuzzy boundaries between red, orange, gold and maroon. They only think in digits, which is too heavy for artistic purpose. One would need to setup a blurry color palette, where it would pick for blue to paint the sky, green for plants, instead of picking #0088FF or #49DE59. Of course these are just thoughts as I browse my RSS, but I guess some of my friends at "Les Algoristes" would find this interesting.

All colors are the friends of their neighbors and the lovers of their opposites.

Mark Chagall