Why Magenta Is not a Real Color, and How it Is Related to Fuzzy Control and Quantum Computing

Abstract

It is well known that every color can be represented as a combination of three basic colors: red, green, and blue. In particular, we can get several colors by combining two of the basic colors. Interestingly, while a combination of two neighboring colors leads to a color that corresponds to a certain frequency, the combination of two non-neighboring colors—red and blue—leads to magenta, a color that does not correspond to any frequency. In this paper, we provide a simple explanation for this phenomenon, and we also show that a similar phenomenon happens in two other areas where we can find a natural analogy with colors: fuzzy control and quantum computing. Since the analogy with fuzzy control has already led to efficient applications, we hope that the newly discovered analogy with quantum computing will also lead to computational speedup.