Human Beautification Algorithm | Hacker News Reader

Human Beautification Algorithm

mindhacks.com

23 pointsmlLK18 comments

2010: hardware version of these appears in glasses, adjusting what you see in real-time. alcohol consumption drops 40%, prolonging the lives of millions. Huge population boom occurs. 1-10 scale of attractiveness now goes to 11.

2020: global warming forces us to walk around naked. the glasses become mandatory. 40% of all software engineers now employed as virtual fashion/body engineers. Linden Labs is the larget corporation in the world.

2050: the glasses are now implants and control all sensory input; a few hackers then find out that for the last 10 years everyone has been eating slimy green algae and living huddled together in a giant pit, with the rest of the planet free of humanity -- all Earth's troubles was fixed in software -- controlled by small group of Python hackers.

For an actual great story in similar lines about perception and reality, (I hope I don't spoil too much), read Stanislaw Lem's "The Futurological Congress" -- http://www.amazon.com/Futurological-Congress-Memoirs-Ijon-Ti...

I remember a Discover magazine article on something similar from when I was just a little kid. I can't recall the exact thesis, but the basics was that researchers were using an algorithm to combine pictures of people into a single face.

The interesting thing was that the more pictures they combined into a face, the more attractive the face became! Of course, once they added enough faces, and the male and female pictures became almost the same androgynous face - still attractive but too average to be appealing in my (3rd grader at the time) opinion.

Beauty as an average seems like a strange concept at first, but I suppose it's true that people aren't usually attracted to sharp or surprising facial characteristics.

I would expect certain features of beauty to remain constant over time, like symmetric features--which is suppose to be indicative of normal development and hormone levels.

However, other features--what's considered attractive--I expect to change over time, especially if it's a secondary sexual characteristic used in preening. It'd be interesting to see it change over time.

Given enough faces to average, and you end up with a nearly iconic human image (http://boston.conman.org/2007/08/28.1). And I shudder to think of what Hollywood would do with this technology.

while ( woman < attractive )

{

drink (beer);

}

For certain values of 'woman' you get an infinite loop.

Not to worry, the system runs out of resources and halts in short order. I've heard that memory (and other things) leak as well.

The before and after picture doesn't seem so illustrative for me: in fact the after picture doesn't look as nice to me.

Which would you rather make out with?

I thought the same, so I clicked through to the project page, where the results are more convincing:

http://www.cs.tau.ac.il/~tommer/beautification2008/

Online dating is about to take a big dive.

sleep - exercise - happiness - kindness

= mom?

It seems to turn every man into Orlando Bloom.

How will it modify an African person? Asian?

Are there different algorithms for those?

I know someone will chime in that beauty is universal but I have my doubts.

You'll notice that they didn't claim to have created some objective measure of beauty, they just mined information given to them by several hundred different people. There's obviously going to be some sort of sociological bias there. I've seen more "mathematical" measurements of the ideal face based on the golden ratio, but they did seem to tend towards a western ideal of beauty.

This sort of stuff is pretty mediagenic (every time someone does this, it gets press), but ultimately pretty useless. I have to assume it's just a bunch of guys with a facial detection algorithm and a bunch of time on their hands. It would be more interesting if they could map the parameter space of reasonable-looking human faces, to enable the easy creation of a random, realistic face.

would love to see this algorithm in reverse

Why?

Reply on news.ycombinator.com