Generator

Four departures from the model equation, each at an ordinary strength

What each of the four assumptions inside a colour integral costs, in ΔE₀₀, on a stated sample under a stated light. The wavelength index is a coated printing paper measured with and without the ultraviolet of D50; the range is the same paper integrated from 300 nanometres and from 380; the place index is a pigmented plastic through a four-millimetre radius; the direction index is an eggshell paint beside a window. The spread is a factor of 7.0. This is a ranking of four examples rather than of four departures — each of them can be made larger by choosing a more extreme sample, and the marble in the same collection of materials reaches 12.7 on the index that comes third here.
Four departures from the model equation, each at an ordinary strength. What each of the four assumptions inside a colour integral costs, in ΔE₀₀, on a stated sample under a stated light. The wavelength index is a coated printing paper measured with and without the ultraviolet of D50; the range is the same paper integrated from 300 nanometres and from 380; the place index is a pigmented plastic through a four-millimetre radius; the direction index is an eggshell paint beside a window. The spread is a factor of 7.0. This is a ranking of four examples rather than of four departures — each of them can be made larger by choosing a more extreme sample, and the marble in the same collection of materials reaches 12.7 on the index that comes third here.

Drawn at its defaults, in the indices the model integrated away. It reads 1 option and no others: show.

Called by 10 essays

the blast radius of changing it

Where the model breaks

The model has six arguments

Every colour computed here is an integral of a reflectance against a light against three curves, and a reflectance is one number per wavelength. A real surface's response is a function of six arguments — the wavelength, direction and place light arrives with, and the three it leaves with — so the model keeps one of them, takes a diagonal, integrates two away and assumes two more equal.

Where the model breaks

Either factor being zero

Four different departures from the colour integral turn out to have one algebraic form — each is an inner product of something the sample does that the model has no slot for with something the light does that the model assumed away. Either factor being zero makes the departure exactly zero, and the sizes of the two factors decide neither how large it is nor which way it goes.

What it takes to deliver it

Which index to buy an instrument for

Four departures from the colour integral, ranked by what they cost and by what it would take to remove each one. The ranking by cost and the ranking by price are almost exactly reversed — the two largest are removed by specifying a lamp and by widening a table, and the two that need new hardware are the two smallest.

Difference and uniformity

Two departures that partly cancel

A glossy translucent sample has two of this round's four departures at once, and the expectation was that they would compound. They do the opposite. An aperture takes light away that went into the material and came back too far out; an interface returns light that never went in at all — so measuring either alone overstates what both together do, on every material tested.

What a camera does

The chart was measured, not photographed

A camera profile is fitted so that the camera's response maps onto the chart's tristimulus values, and those values came out of a spectrophotometer. So the profile's target carries the instrument's departures and the camera does not — a mildly translucent chart read through a four-millimetre aperture supplies targets 2.55 ΔE₀₀ from the truth, which is twice the profile's own fitting error.

Difference and uniformity

The departures are larger than the tolerance

A delivery tolerance is written around one ΔE₀₀ and every one of this round's four departures is above it on ordinary material. A specification that names an illuminant, an observer and a tolerance, and does not name a measurement condition, an aperture and a field, has written a number that two honest laboratories can miss each other on by more than the number itself.

Where the model breaks

A departure is not a unit

The previous round audited six published quantities by swapping the unit they were quoted in — a function applied at the end of each computation. Nothing of that shape works here. A departure changes the object at the start, so every stage in between has to accept it, and only two of the same six quantities can take one at all. The fourth cannot even be expressed in the interface.

Where the model breaks

The audit that changed the object

Three rounds audited this collection's numbers, its sets and its conventions, and each one ended by naming the same thing it could not reach — that a surface is a reflectance. This round reached it, found that four departures share one algebraic form, had two of its predictions refused, and discovered that its own hemisphere quadrature had been passing a convergence check by luck.

Where the model breaks

Three audits and one shape

The tabulation, the observer and the scene solver have nothing in common as subjects. Each turned out to hold a departure that is a pairing of two deviations, vanishes exactly when either is empty, and had been invisible because its parameter had no call site. Three subjects, one shape, and the shape is the round's result.

Where the model breaks

What this round could not reach

Three audits, about twenty departures and ten conditions, and a longer list of things that were named and not measured. Every item on it is specific, most of them are an afternoon's work, and the reason none was done is the same in every case — the round ran out of round.

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