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Comment by jnty | Hacker News Reader

Given the likelihood of coincidences like that actually happening, you'd surely end up finding lots and lots of pairs of completely unrelated people that look remarkably similar, with no way of knowing if any of them are actually the same person.

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A surprise benefit may be finding out which members of the human race are actually immortal and have been hiding it from the rest of society. /s

https://www.popdust.com/conspiracy-theory-thursday-keanu-ree...

I've always found it slightly amusing that we've now reached the time in the history of civilization where immortality, even were it possible, has become a massive liability. One can no longer simply assume a new identity of proper age, and attempting to do so is liable to get you jailed, or worse still, in some shady government lab.

It's even getting to be the case now that you can't just move to a new country and start over. Unless you've got skilled forgers close at hand, you're going to have a bad time immediately, and with facial recognition and biometrics, you'll have a worse time still.

It's perhaps the definition of a low-probability corner case, but if any alchemists happened to succeed, they're no doubt having a pretty depressing century.

I think if you've lived a few centuries, you might've picked up the skills, experience and connections required to make it work. There are already plenty of regular people living with false identities, so you wouldn't stick out like a sore thumb. Plastic surgery solves the rest.

> I think if you've lived a few centuries, you might've picked up the skills, experience and connections required to make it work.

This is how the immortals from Ilaria Corporation handled it in Helix. The show was promising, it's really sad it quickly went from interesting to crazy to utter gross.

Keanu's relatives.

Could you not use metadata to create a confidence score? For example, if two people look similar but the dates of the photos are 100+ years apart, it’s unlikely they’re the same person.

This is how we find the time travelers :)

I think this is key. Figuring out a name from a photo with no additional data would give a high probability of incorrect identification. But any metadata attached to the photos could be useful.

Date the photo was taken.

Where the photo was taken (e.g. the annual family reunion in SmallTown, Illinois)

Photographer. They're likely taking photos of the same general set of people or in the same geographic area.

Time+location of other similar photos. Back in the days of the civil war, it wouldn't be possible for someone to be in to locations 1,000 miles apart in 2 days.

Side note: I recently saw a video from ~1910 in New York City. Everybody in the video had a similar physical build and would make the "average" person today look fat. I wonder how this would affect the confidence of photo grouping? Overall, did people look more homogeneous back then?

Cynically, I'm going to say you either find unsurprising matches (eg. photos of the same group of people taken on different days) or even more convincing and hard-to-detect false positives.

If your goal is explicitly to find something extremely rare - unexpected face matches in different places - you will be flooded with false positives even if the false positive rate is fairly low.

You have a lot of context/metadata like date taken (or at the worst, date acquired for a historical collection, giving a terminus ante quem) and can easily figure out the false positive rate. You may not know if two matches are the same person, but if one photo is dated to 1850-1860 and another photo is dated to 1931, you can safely infer that you have a false positive. Over a dataset of matches, that gives you an idea of how reliable each one.

Give people access to all the other clues like "insignia and inscription" and probably a lot of reliable identifications can be made, and the remainder flagged as 'possible but uncertain'.

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