My pareidolia knows no bounds.

Back to pareidolia again.

I think we should make a start on fleshing out what we want from some sort of psychological experiment. Let's think about using Fred's pictures as our main control group and pictures of the Earth from space as our secondary control.

The Mars pictures we divide into artifacts and artifice (note: British city railway stations look like cathedrals, can we tease apart form and function when dealing with possible alien aesthetics)

We need to have different information to give to the people doing the tests. We need to have information from them on their world view.

Can we sell this idea as "sexy" television? Horizon looks to be a possible programme to approach.

Can we sell this to NASA? A manned Mars mission is likely, the crew might need a few pareidoiacs to balance things. Also, I think this experimant would be of help in actually selecting a landing site. Also as p.r. for them it looks good. Then there is the problem that NASA had with the moon landings. Craters can look like hills, and it was a serious concern as to whether a lander pilot might get confused and crash.

Stoat- If "sexy television" is what your looking for, i have several very sexy pareidolic couples in interesting positions. If this doesn't do it, i have an interesting shot of a male and female sex organ in pre-coital positioning. Having a shadow banned, would certainly add to any publicity.

[] Nah, sexy television is where people talk about the programme before and after the screening.

Interesting reading!

TVF: So when we see something elaborate on Mars, such as "First Family", we haven't yet found a way to prove it isn't pareidolia, but are suspicious that it is artificial because finding things with that level of elaborateness is so easy on Mars and so hard on Earth.

Has anyone asked why we are not seeing lots of "faces" in the various moon photographs? Seems odd to me that mars photos are polluted with them and none are seen in the moonscape photos.

pareidoliac: If some experiment could be done connecting facial recognition systems to digital cameras shooting shadows, i know we would all be amazed. This is not mere belief, but an empirical a posteriori hypothesis.

Fujifilm has recently released a new camera:

"Even without its revolutionary face-detection technology, the FinePix S6000fd is a formidable package. Combining the highly-acclaimed 35mm (equiv) Fujinon zoom lens and the award-winning picture quality of the 6.3 million pixel 6th Generation Super CCD, this is a camera capable of stunning picture quality in all shooting conditions. However what really makes the S6000 stand out from the crowd is its ultra-fast face detection technology."

It will be interesting to see what happens when it is pointed at one of Fred's boards.

<blockquote id="quote"><font size="2" face="Verdana, Arial, Helvetica" id="quote">quote:<hr height="1" noshade id="quote"><i>Originally posted by shando</i>
<br />Has anyone asked why we are not seeing lots of "faces" in the various moon photographs? Seems odd to me that mars photos are polluted with them and none are seen in the moonscape photos.<hr height="1" noshade id="quote"></blockquote id="quote"></font id="quote">Interestly enough, I wondered the same thing. But when I looked for Moon images, I didn't really find anything comparable to the 200,000 or so MOC gallery.

Regarding the "face recognition" cameras. Given my experience with pattern recognition in the 80s and voice recognition in the 90s, I'd say give it some time before it's capable of detecting shadow faces. I don't have any personal experience with the Fugi you quoted, but I do have a brand new Nikon that has face recognition. When it finds a face, it does a great job on lighting and focus for a portrait type picture, but in the brief amount of time I've used it, I wasn't overly impressed by it's ability to find REAL faces, let alone shadow faces.

The first voice recognition software that my company implemented went something like this:

"Please say the name of the person you would like to call."
"Smith."
"Did you say 'Fish'?"
"No, Smith."
"Did you say 'Northrop'?"
"NO! I said 'Smith' you idiot!"
"Did you say 'Vanderbilt'?"
"NO, you stinkin' moron I said 'Smith'."
"Did you say, 'Ambercrombie and Finch'?"
"Yes that's it"......SLAM!

It was quite entertaining.

rd

The perception of no progress in the field of AI is partly due to the fact that it has turned out to be much harder than originallly thought.

But another part of the perception of no progress is due to the fact that our estimation of what is and what is not AI is a moving target. While a new product is in development, and missing every deadline set for release, everyone jokes about it and wonders if we will even be able to achieve artificial stupidity.

Eventually some AI products do make it to market and perform well, but there are no fanfares or news conferences. Afterall, these products are "just" software. Most experts (sometimes including the developers) no longer think of it as AI.

So we move the goal post, begin developing a new product, and dust off the old jokes. (AI is sneaking up on us.)

LB