Colour Memory — Cultural Color Intelligence for AI
https://api.colourmemory.com/mcp ↗
Description
The world's only historically grounded colour archive built for AI agents. Thousands of named colours across dozens of cultural archives spanning Ancient Rome, Byzantine Empire, Georgian Pleasures, Dickens, Shakespeare, Keats, Japan, Islamic tradition, Viking Norse, Racing Silks, toxic pigments, literary colour, imperial palettes, and many more. Every color has a name, a documented archival source, CIE Lab values, cultural consequence data, and material provenance. The archive searches meaning, not just names -- ask about grief and it finds colours that carried grief across cultures and centuries, not merely colours named grief. Built as a retrieval system, not a generator. Deterministic, evidence-based, source-cited. The anti-hallucination layer for colour history.
What our measurements say
Colour Memory — Cultural Color Intelligence for AI is a remote MCP server published at api.colourmemory.com. It has been probed 7 times since 9/10/2026. It answered in 7 of them (100.0%), a near-uninterrupted record. Median response time is 1,048 ms, a delay an agent will notice. It exposes a broad tool surface of 91 tools. On the protocol side it still runs 2025-11-25 and has not moved to the newer spec.
Agent readability score
Can an LLM agent pick the right tool here — names, descriptions and parameter clarity are assessed.
Agent readability score
Strengths
- Exceptional 'when-to-use' guidance within tool descriptions
- High-level compound tools reduce token overhead and chaining complexity
- Clear distinction between deterministic data retrieval and generative tasks
- Strongly descriptive and intent-focused tool names
Weaknesses
- Significant functional overlap between high-level 'all-in-one' tools
- Parameter ambiguity in some batch vs. single-item tools
- Potential agent confusion regarding specific palette generation methods
colour_passport— Confusing parameter naming (hex vs hexes)extract_image_colours— Redundant image and image_url parameterspalette_pdf— Vague 'query' parameterbrand_report— High functional overlap with colour_strategy
Verdict
Event narrative
Risk: medium
- 2026-09-10T21:16:35.016Z — Era changed from 'auth-gated' to 'legacy' · Agent transitioned to legacy mode, possibly reducing access restrictions
- 2026-09-11T01:59:45.474Z — Compliance score set to 100 · Indicates full compliance achieved, enhancing system trustworthiness
Advice
Schema compliance
tools/list structure, inputSchema validity, and a functional smoke test — the components of the 0-100 score.
- tools/list schema valid
- inputSchema is valid JSON Schema
- Smoke test failed · last run:
- Cold-start: cold 190ms → warm 196ms (penalty 0ms)
Availability history
Event log
Derived by comparing consecutive probes — changes in era, protocol version, build and reachability.
- Server build: — → 2.3.4
- Supported versions: — → 2025-11-25
- Era changed: Auth-gated → Legacy
- Added to watch — era: Auth-gated
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