Beauty is in the eye of the computer

by Gene on Apr. 02nd, 2008
in Math

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Beauty is truth, truth beauty,—that is all Ye know on earth, and all ye need to know.: Or, as the poets say, "hubba-hubba."
Courtesy beardenb

An Israeli student has written a computer program to recognize beauty. Human volunteers were asked to rate the attractiveness of several dozen photo portraits. The photos, along with their scores, were fed into the computer. The computer measured the faces and looked for commonalities between the ones rated most attractive.

The human subjects then rated another set of photos. The computer reviewed these, and compared them to what it had learned with the first set. It then rated the new photos. The computer’s ratings were very close to those provided by the humans.

The most impressive thing about this experiment is that the computer learned by itself. The programmers did not give the computer a definition of beauty. Rather, they let the machine figure it out for itself. This is considered a major step forward for artificial intelligence.

And if you’re wondering, average faces with no distinguishing characteristics are considered the most beautiful, both by humans and computers.