Chernoff's Faces

futilitycloset.com

15 points·sebg··6 comments

Utterly surprised not yet to see a reference here to Peter Watt's Blindsight [1], which integrated Chernoff's faces as a data visualization. If you haven't read it yet, go read it. You'll thank me.

1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blindsight_(Watts_novel)

Thank you! :-)

This finally confirms I'm not a human. I sort of always suspected I have problems recognizing and remembering faces, but looking at Chernoff's ones makes it obvious. My intuition is completely unable to compare those faces; I feel uncomfortable even looking at them. I guess I'll stick to small multiples of colored scatterplots or something.

Prosopagnosia[1] is a real condition that affects ≈2.5% of people. You might check out "The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat" if you're interested.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prosopagnosia

Thanks for the link, I didn't know about this thing. Sacks's book is actually (I think) somewhere on my desk gathering dust, I'll need to get around to reading it.

Anyway, in my case it's nowhere near that bad. I can recognize faces with enough exposure, but I have problems remembering them when first seeing, as well as enumerating features, imagining the faces and comparing them between each other. I can do all of that, but it takes a lot of effort and time.

I can tell that they're different, but the differences are really subtle in large groups of them.

Numbered left to right, top to bottom.

2,4,6,7,9 look close enough that I probably wouldn't be able to guess which one it was if I only saw one of them at a time.

1,3,11,12 looks similar, I might be able to tell the recognize 3 and 11 on their own.

10 looks similar to the 2nd group, but is different enough that I could probably pick it out.

5 and 8 are unique enough that they stand out by themselves.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com