This took me about 5 mins -- score 0. Gender: female, age range: 16-19.
My method: I first grouped them in a rough approximation, and then treated it like a bubble sort -- I compared two at a time and moved them if one was closer to the goal color.
I scored 0. My strategy: first group the colors roughly by their "greenness", "brownness", etc., and then blur vision by going slightly cross-eyed, making it easier to see faults in the gradient. Adjust accordingly.
For those with good scores, was this effortless? I ended up running out of patience. Spending longer would have given better results, but does that miss the point?
It does take some time, and it depends on your screen. Some TFTs have terrible colour resolution depending on gamma setting. (nowhere near 16M distinct colours) Lower-end CRTs will make it difficult too.
I'm a sucker for charts, so I hope X-rite releases some bell-curves based on the cumulative data they're collecting here.
The eye's lens tends to develop a yellow tint over time, so that suggests the older age ranges would have more points in the cyan range. And colorblindness is more common in men, so that might show up too. Or, more likely, the charts would just show which group has the best monitors. Useful marketing information, anyway.
Seeing as other people sounded like they had a hard time, I took a long time taking the test. My eyes hurt after a while (I think it's because the light cones get saturated) so I'm taking a break. After ten minutes of taking this, I literally couldn't see straight; the lines on the page looked like squiggles.
Update: got 19 (best is 0). Small problems across the map, in yellows, cyans, light purples, and pinks.
Scored a 4 on my laptop LCD, all problems in the cyans. I found that it helped to do it kind of like a MergeSort: separate hues into 3 groups at the extremes / middle, sort each group separately, then correct any errors where they overlap.
I scored 80 on my CRT, but 0 on my LCD. Obviously the monitor is a very determining factor. So either you re a bit weaker in the greens, either it's your monitor that is. I would bet on the second possibility.
I scored 7 on my macbook, also having problems with greens.
The human eye is usually able to distinguish more shades of green than any other color -- think hunters in forested areas. Perhaps this is changing as more people stare at their monitors all day or bask in the CRT blue. Also more people are near sighted these days.
OK, I'm not making this up. 7. On a Macbook Pro. Also having problems with greens. I think this is because our displays don't have true 24bit color; they use dithering.
I would have thought that brightness would have been the main factor in a monitor, surely all the hues are relative. You aren't trying to pick something colour realistic from life, you are just ranking relative to the rest of the screen.
I wonder how many other people in my age group there were, it didn't say... It does look like men from 20-29 mostly fared really well according to the graph, but it would be cool to see more detail anyway.
I would argue that there is indeed some kind of "color affinity", if we don't want to call it color intelligence. My father is a painter, and at some workshops people often asked him how to get some specific color or another. He told me that it was a problem he didn't understood, because he never encountered it even when he started painting. Colors just come easily to him, in a intuitive way, he never had to read theory about it.
To me, there is some parallelism with the guys who are gifted at math or logic : there are a lot of things that come intuitively to them where others have to struggle. The difference is that we are more prone to call them smart than people with other sort of abilities (musicians, painters, etc.).
My method: I first grouped them in a rough approximation, and then treated it like a bubble sort -- I compared two at a time and moved them if one was closer to the goal color.