Beauty Is In The Eye Of The Beholder - Scientists Teach Computer To Identify Hot Women

As the old saying goes: “Beauty is in the eye of the beholder” But does the beholder have to be human?
“I know that Plato connected the good to the beautiful,” says Amit Kagian, a M.Sc. from the TAU School of Computer Sciences of the Tel Aviv University, who has successfully “taught” a computer how to interpret attractiveness in women.
Until now, computers have been taught how to identify basic facial characteristics, such as the difference between a woman and a man, and even to detect facial expressions. But the new software, developed by Amit Kagian, lets a computer make an aesthetic judgment. Linked to sentiments and abstract thought processes, humans can make a judgment, but they usually don’t understand how they arrived at their conclusions

The notion that beauty can be boiled down to binary data and interpreted by a mathematical model is nothing new. More than 2,000 years ago the Greek mystic, philosopher and mathematician Pythagoras observed the connection between math, geometry and beauty. He reasoned that features of physical objects corresponding to the “golden ratio” were considered most attractive

New however is that a computer can be taught to make an aesthetic judgment as though the computer “learned” implicitly how to interpret beauty through processing previous data it had received from sentiments and abstract thought processes, humans made, but didn’t understand how they arrived at their conclusions.
Based on human preferences, the machine “learned” the relation between facial features and attractiveness scores and was then put to the test on a set of faces.

“The computer produced impressive results,” says Amit Kagian “its rankings were very similar to the rankings people gave.”