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Comment by NathanKP | Hacker News Reader

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.

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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.

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