Computers can give an aesthetic judgment
Computers today are capable of aesthetic judgment A program developed by a Canadian student has proved it. This student has developed his system in a manner that it can rate human appearance by recognizing the characteristics of human attractiveness. And the amazing part is that the computer produces human-like evaluations and rates people’s attractiveness on a scale of 1 to 10.
This student had first compiled a human rating about attractiveness by using 33 volunteers from a University. These ratings were then fed to the computer, which was then asked to rate the 33 faces. The computer’s response was then quantified & analyzed. The rankings of the computer were within one point of the human participant’s ratings. This comes to 86% of the times. Post this, the photos of volunteers, both men and women, were fed to the computer. Now, the system had been trained in advance to gauge what all features add up to an attractive human. Based on this input, the computer was able to judge each photo in a manner which was quite similar to that of human rating.
This study is being discussed & is being widely appreciated in academic circles. In fact, this student has been invited to the International Conference on Neural Computation, to be held in Portugal.
This is a very important study. In fact, it might actually help diagnose congenital disorders like Down syndrome, since many of such disorders can be recognized by certain facial features. Accordingly, pattern recognition programs could be developed to find cures. In fact, this student wants to extend the study to assess personality by studying facial features. One can never forget that our face is an index of underlying personality. A lot can be learnt by just one look at a face. The fact remains that we make a judgment about people within a tenth of a second in our very first meeting.
Earlier too, a M.Sc. graduate had created a similar program which taught the computer to first understand and then process the factors which contribute to attractiveness. He had emphasized the edge a computer had over humans due to its capability of understanding how it reached that conclusion. Basically, this refers to logic. Humans on the other hand, are always influenced by emotions, sentiments and abstract thoughts. They do not know how to judge beauty. In fact, this concept can be traced back to Pythagoras who had concluded that physical objects lying close within the golden ratio were attractive.
So, now we will get an unbiased opinion from our beloved computer & get a logical aesthetic judgement.