Women's Attractiveness Judged by Software 348
Roland Piquepaille writes "According to Haaretz, an Israeli team of computer scientists has developed software that ranks facial attractiveness of women. Instead of identifying basic facial characteristics, this software has been designed to make aesthetic judgments — after training. The lead researcher said this program 'constitutes a substantial advance in the development of artificial intelligence.' It is interesting to note that the researchers focused on women only. Apparently, men' faces are more difficult to grade."
Original Paper & Obvious Criticisms (Score:5, Insightful)
There are some obvious criticisms:
Second, this was done using eigenalysis and principle component analysis. While that's interesting, I have not always found that to be a great approach. Five or six years ago, they were all the rage although I cannot really find anything fruitful that has come from applying this to human faces. This also means that they cannot generate the 'most beautiful' face but if they did, it would simply be the composition of all their eigenvectors (in this case, ghostly looking images of faces) into one representing the highest scoring beauty.
Why don't they tell us how this scored some celebrities from around the world like say Iman Abdulmajid, Zsa Zsa Gabor & Angelina Jolie? I have a feeling that their system is over-trained and would perform poorly in real life. Facial beauty requires imagination and this system was hand trained on a hundred points. I don't think that's enough but I wish they would have published more results to either prove or disprove my criticisms.
Even beyond that... (Score:5, Interesting)
In the end, it all comes down to individual perception. Sit ten guys down with thirty pictures, and you're going to get 10 different #1's. Maybe you can teach a program to be able to say who it thinks is hot, whatever use that is. Or you could write a program that would allow a person to rate a hundred or so pictures, so that you could run a dating service that automatically pairs you up with people it thinks you'll find attractive...That's the only use I can come up with.
Re:Even beyond that... (Score:5, Funny)
I wonder how the algorithm works after the machine has had a few beers.
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Bite my shiny metal *ss
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Re:Even beyond that... (Score:5, Funny)
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A male designed algorithm will be processing everything from the neck down
Ohhh, and the whole damn thing could BSOD on some DD's.....
Re:Even beyond that... (Score:5, Funny)
The algorithm works better, but the hardware fails.
Re:Even beyond that... (Score:5, Funny)
Here's the revised version:
hotness_t is_good_looking_drunk(void* girl) {
return ID_TAP_THAT;
}
void hangover(void* girl) {
if(is_slashdotter(this) || girl == NULL) {
basement.exit();
new breakfast()->eat();
throw new moan();
}
try {
if(memory.search(LAST_NIGHT, "condom") || !is_good_looking_sober(girl)) {
exit(EXIT_QUIETLY);
} else throw new logic_error("Yeah right");
} catch (amnesia_error* e) {
aspirin* a = find(this->apartment(), T_ASPIRIN);
if(a == NULL) throw new moan();
else this->ingest(a);
}
}
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Re:Even beyond that... (Score:5, Insightful)
When you put enough numbers together, all you really get is the sort of bland result that is acceptable to the largest number of people. The female equivalent of McDonald's food, top 40 music, and white bread...No real room in there for the beauty that can occasionally startle you, stop you in your tracks, that we all look for and seldom find on television.
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You obviously don't watch Univision!!!
Anyway, even if you're completely right, explaining 98% or 99% of beauty still seems like an interesting intellectual exercise.
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you are kidding right? Even programming a very simple algorithm along the lines of
bigger eyes, beauty++
highly symmetrical face, beauty++
triangular or oval shaped face, beauty++
clear skin, beauty++
will give you a pretty good set of matches
Re:Even beyond that... (Score:5, Funny)
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Especiall on /.
Re:Even beyond that... (Score:4, Funny)
Re:Even beyond that... (Score:5, Insightful)
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Attractive people are treated better from a young age and, knowingly or unknowingly, they leverage this asset to get what they want.
All beautiful women who have been stalked, abused, or raped because they are physically attractive, may beg to differ. Also, not being taken seriously because you're a "barbie doll" is a less-than-subtle discrimination permeating Western society. Attractiveness, like all things, has good and bad points. It is fallacious to say it is an asset without costs.
You may be interested in reading about the "evolutionarily deceptive" teenage years, where soon-to-be-ugly people appear attractive to seduce a mate, and
Re:Even beyond that... (Score:5, Funny)
Re:Even beyond that... (Score:4, Insightful)
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Re:Someone doesn't know the definition of empirica (Score:4, Insightful)
The fact that there are no empirical standards for beauty is not due to the absence of any common standards for beauty (albeit not universally applicable), rather our inability to represent the metrics of the mind using mathematical or linguistic representations.
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What would be useful for a computer dating service would be for you to rate each girl as you see them in terms of attractiveness, similar interests, etc. and use an algorithm like this to then filter out women that you probably wouldn't be interested in. Since each person's definition of beauty differs, it really needs to learn an individual's preference. Ideally, this could be combined with latent semantic analysis of the text that the potential dates typed as part of their profile to further improve mat
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Joking aside, most people already are symmetrical, so it would definitely stand out for people who aren't.
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The study that I think you're referencing was actually linking symmetry and fidelity. They found that if a man's face was a little bit asymmetrical, his wife/girlfriend was measurably more likely to cheat on him than if he had a symmetrical face. The hypothesized explanation had to do with instinctive sexual selection, so there was an undertone of symmetry = beauty, but they didn't spell it out like that.
The summary I read ma
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This is true in part because it depends on what the individual looks like.
There was a study some years back that basically established a link between having similar features and being attractive. Essentially, people who shared features with or looked similar to a person would be less attractive to that person, and more familial.
But the wide and obvious variation in what gets people off should've been sufficient indication of this flaw in the first place
Flaw in "average" beauty: smooth skin (Score:3, Informative)
The
Re:Even beyond that... (Score:4, Insightful)
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Re:Original Paper & Obvious Criticisms (Score:5, Funny)
Software should conform to the normal 10pt ranking scale damnit!
Re:Original Paper & Obvious Criticisms (Score:5, Funny)
Software should conform to the normal 10pt ranking scale damnit!
"I've never done a ten, but I did five twos in one night!"
--George Carlin
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1st number (1-10 scale) facial beauty.
2nd number (binary choice) 1 (would hit that) 0 (wouldn't hit that)
3rd number (1-10 scale) body.
Here's to the 919's out there!
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Not to mention... (Score:2)
I agree; this does nothing but fancy correlations of faces with judgments of beauty made by a small sample of "instructors". If you were to increase the number of instructors, especially if you made them more diverse (say by region and culture), you would end up with a meaningless hodge-podge... the more meaningless the larger the sample.
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In the first stage, 30 human participants were asked to rate from 1-7 the beauty of several dozen pictures.
For a masters project (which this was), that's a decent sample size. For research and practice, I do not think that will suffice. Why don't they tell us how this scored some celebrities from around the world like say Iman Abdulmajid, Zsa Zsa Gabor & Angelina Jolie? I have a feeling that their system is over-trained and would perform poorly in real life. Facial beauty requires imagination and this system was hand trained on a hundred points. I don't think that's enough but I wish they would have published more results to either prove or disprove my criticisms.
The number of participants in user studies are usually pretty low. A 30 person sample size is actually pretty good. It would have been better if the number of participants exceeded the number of items being rated though. That would have made this project better. A simple case would simply have been to enlist a bunch of undergrads from some classes. Double bonus points if he got their participation in the project mandatory. Tha
Wrong Metric! (Score:5, Insightful)
Or perhaps their bank accounts are easier to derive a "value" from!
I kid, I kid. I think.
Re:Wrong Metric! (Score:5, Funny)
If I had mod points I'd mod you '+1 divorced'
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Speaking of which that goes for boobs, too. I also wonder if this one metric would lead to performance as good as what the research in TFA managed.
As we all know.... (Score:5, Insightful)
Men will nail anything and the women really control sexual interactions. The cost of mating is far lower for men than for women therefore women are far more choosy.
Re:As we all know.... (Score:5, Insightful)
Men will nail anything and the women really control sexual interactions. The cost of mating is far lower for men than for women therefore women are far more choosy.
Not quite (Score:3, Funny)
requires external criteria (Score:5, Insightful)
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Re:requires external criteria (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:requires external criteria (Score:4, Interesting)
I'm not an expert of male attractiveness, nor do I play one on Slashdot, but I imagine similar factors (absence of damage, proportionality of features, symmetry on the vertical plane, etc.) would play a similar enough role. That said, there have been plenty of studies showing that the "attractiveness" of a male's face corresponds to the menstrual cycle of the female: during ovulation, the "rugged and handsome" look is preferrable to "nice and well-shaved" whereas the inverse is generally true at other times.
As for "wealthy and powerful", I guess that could similarly depend on the financial and social status of the female. I prefer to consider it a truism in the same way that in the wild, it's typically the biggest, strongest, or the one with the most goodies that gets the opportunity to mate.
A side note for anyone cherishing the notion that everything is relative or personal, and there can be no standard of attractiveness. Even across disparate cultures where such things can run into the extremes, the attractiveness value of facial symmetry, to take one example, remains universal. I remember a PBS program on the subject years back that examined the faces of famous movie stars. Turns out by taking a ruler to the face of someone like Brad Pitt or Angelina Jolie, you'll discover both have nearly perfectly symmetrical faces. I imagine one could conclude there's some form of Golden Ratio [wikipedia.org] that applies, particularly to body shapes like those of Angeline Jolie.
Wow, so much bitterness (Score:2)
Probably the biggest issue is that our society has a bunch of different "sexy" archetypes for men. Men can be Ashton-Kutcher-hot, young and muscular and so on, or George-Clooney-hot, older and more distinguished, or nerdy-but-hot or ravishing-seducer-hot or football-player-hot or whatever.
Women are basically judged on a single metric: how close they look to
Woman scientists will retaliate... (Score:4, Funny)
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He was old... and shorter.. and balding.. and
After three very painful months, I cut off all contact wit
Re:Woman scientists will retaliate... (Score:5, Interesting)
It takes time to build a friendship, then a sexual interest, then a romantic relationship-- the guys I know who have stable relationships do not let their women hang around alone with other men. When their feelers go up they chase the guy off- usually just by saying very mildly that they are not comfortable with the situation.
In my case, they had a business relationship first.. then started meeting for lunch-- then I stopped being copied on emails-- then his wife stopped being copied on emails-- then they acknowledged something deeper than friendship (this is about 5 months in-- like I said, I got to read every email from both of them once I stopped the blind trust thing), then they started having sex-- then she had some work conferences (i.e. trips to his ranch)-- (now we are at 7 months)-- then they had a full out affair- he dropped hundreds if not thousands on jewelry, flowers, dinners and THEN he found out about me (she told him there was no one else-- he was married so there was no conflict right away) -- THEN she fought him for three months to keep both of us-- finally she told me and tried to keep both of us but as you would imagine, she was 60% him / 40% me and sliding towards him by then or else she would have cut him off instead of trying to keep both of us.
You are right- we are all individuals who control our own destinies and we have no strong control others. But it take time to slide from loving someone to being willing to lie and betray them. If you catch them early, then you can stop things before they are too far along.
If he had not been so damn wealthy I do not think it would have been an issue. It was like the second sentence out of her mouth when she broke the news to me. The universe had sent a wealthy man to take care of her. It was right after she said crying that she had had an affair with someone and she didn't want to lose me.
And I make a good income and wasn't stingy on sharing it and had proposed. She was gloriously happy while at the same time she was being a complete skank. She and he started out with the idea that it would be a discrete little side thing that they would do during the day and "no one would get hurt". His family is hurt... I'm torn all to hell... his wife is hurt. The two of them lied to everyone. I damn near had a nervous breakdown over it because there was almost no warning. I knew she was under stress and consoled her and she told me it was about her business- I trusted her completely at that point. The stress was apparently really that she was fighting with him to keep it all secret and under wraps.
I wouldn't be posting but she tried to open up contact with me again last week after I had successfully ended contact with her for several weeks and that attempt opened up all the pain again.
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Unless there's something about this guy that you don't know or aren't telling us, your ex is a gold-digger and that spiritual connection you felt was you being a hopeless romantic idealist. It's easier to write off half the human population as lying, treacherous harlots than to admit that you might have been wrong about her specifi
This article is useless without Pics (Score:5, Funny)
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more average is more attractive (Score:5, Interesting)
Skin smoothness (Score:5, Interesting)
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I've noticed that most of the beauty contest contestants look "bland" to me. Its not that they are ugly, its just that they lack "spice". Throw in a few big booties here and there to mix it up, for example. Add in some round faces and a
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Watch TV & movies today... even the busboys and waitresses all look basically the same beauty level as the leads which is very high.
It's like "middle class" families living in $750k houses in movies and TV shows. And it really screws up our expectations and happiness in real life.
Re:more average is more attractive (Score:4, Insightful)
My unscientific opinion is that men tend to rate nearly all women as attractive, and are not very picky beyond that. It's almost a binary, yes/no kind of thing. If pressed a man might be able to say, "this woman is a 6 and this one is a 7" but that rating has no meaning because few, if any, men will pass up the 6 in order to pursue the 7. The male strategy seems to be a shotgun approach - flirt with every woman.
Women on the other hand, seem to rate very few men as attractive, and do seem very picky. A woman will judge a male as "6" and ignore him completely, because she knows a 7 is out there somewhere, if she keeps looking.
In summary, I think that if you picked 10 males and 10 females at random, and then asked 100 or so males to judge the females and vice versa, you would find that the males ranked the majority of the females as attractive, and "in the field" so to speak, you would find the males flirting with all of them. You would find that the females ranked a minority of males as attractive, and "in the field" you would find that those are the only ones they are interested in.
So like you said, an average female face is indeed attractive. This is good news for women. Most of them (and they know this) are attractive to the opposite sex.
Re:more average is more attractive (Score:4, Insightful)
Well, I think that a lot of it is basic, sexual-species instinct. A male who is too picky leaves fewer offspring than a male that is less picky. Thus, we all have the genes of those less picky males, and thus we are less picky. Conversely, a woman makes a huge investment in a child. At least several months and as much as three or four years. A woman who is less picky might get pregnant by a beta male, and then tomorrow, when that alpha male comes along, she can't take advantage of his genes. She loses. So as a result, the more picky females left more fit offspring, and as a result we all carry the genes for picky females.
Contraceptives and abortion haven't been around long enough to change those instincts.
Layered on top of that is our cultural programming, but its effect seems small, often invisible. Culture tells men to commit to one woman and buy her a giant diamond ring, but most men don't (or they do but they cheat) and women complain that men are "afraid of commitment" but that's like saying a bear is afraid to stay awake all winter. Culture tells women - actually, not even culture, most women are smart enough to realize that an average guy with a steady job and no major vices like alcoholism or violence will give them a happier life, but it's just so hard to resist the instinct that says, "bang the dirty guy from the biker gang." LOL!
It's *very* difficult to overcome instinct, especially when you deny that the instinct exists. That's what we do. We pretend that we're special, that we're the only animal without these instincts.
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Perhaps, but it turns out if you take one attractive but not perfectly symmetrical face, split it down the middle and combine with its mirror images, the resulting symmetrical faces are not more attractive; they look wrong.
schmaverage (Score:2)
The research revealed that faces considered beautiful are average - with no extreme facial characteristics.
The procedure would seem to eliminate edge cases offensive to some. Sort of begs the question of semantics of beauty don't it? What could possibly be beautiful in any true sense about an average.
Middlebrow is not the same as tasteful and inoffensive is not the same as impressive.
Comment removed (Score:5, Informative)
Re:more average is more attractive (Score:4, Informative)
Why do we need software for this? (Score:5, Funny)
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Missing Word (Score:5, Funny)
There, fixed that title for you...
Knees (Score:3, Funny)
HotOrNot Turing test (Score:2)
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Still, the lack of any demographic information on the reviewers makes the rest of the data much less useful.
Re:HotOrNot Turing test - exists! (Score:2)
Screenshot (Score:2)
Digital Misogyny (Score:4, Funny)
Strong Genetic Diversity? (Score:2)
Symmetry (Score:5, Interesting)
I read an article a while back that made the point that one of the biggest factors in attractiveness was symmetry. The "perfect" face doesn't have any features out of alignment. There was another study that made the point that "averaging" faces produced more attractiveness, but this was actually the wrong conclusion. It was the averaging process that smoothed out features into perfect alignment.
Symmetry actually makes sense. The more messed up someone's face is from ideal, the worse their genetics could be. Of course, there are other factors such as shiny hair, clear skin, sharp cheekbones, fitness, which all factor back to health.
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Was the computer gay? (Score:2)
The big question, what if the computer doing the rating was a fruit?
However, software suffered from a fatal bug... (Score:2)
Old news (Score:3, Funny)
We knew that (Score:2, Interesting)
Face? (Score:2)
Shallow HAL? (Score:2, Funny)
Something ommitted (Score:5, Interesting)
An intelligent woman looks highly attractive when confused...you can almost see the gears working in her head, trying to figure it out. An unintelligent woman just has a dumb confused look on her face.
From what I have seen, intelligent women tend to not necessarily have more attractive facial features, but a more attractive way of showing their emotion and reaction to things. Not something that is commonly thought about.
Re:Something ommitted (Score:4, Insightful)
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Vast systems already exist to grade men. (Score:2)
Most computer programmers find it trivial to take the short-cut and run a credit score and bank account balance. This is a much more accurate portrayl of men's attractiveness anyway.
what of love? (Score:5, Insightful)
Within a handful of months, I noticed I was finding women with facial and body characteristics similar to hers more attractive than the magazine beauties I normally ogled. Indeed, the model types started looking odd to me.
Now add in cultural and racial preferences and this "breakthrough" starts sounding like "bullshit".
"men's faces are more difficult to grade" ... (Score:2)
Software already exisits (Score:2, Informative)
WHY???? (Score:2)
This being slashdot... (Score:2)
Chicks before D**** (Score:5, Insightful)
Yes, I'm assuming the team was mostly male... hopefully I don't offend anyone with this obvious assumption.