Beauty In The Eye Of The Android

rcswebb writes "According to this article at the BBC - Artificial intelligence experts in Fife (Scotland) have unveiled a robotic head which they say can scientifically determine how attractive women are to men."

Comments

This isn't exactly new, and other questions

[MBCook]

First of all, why a robot head? All you need is a camera. That said, here is how this isn't exaclty new:

I remember seeing on TV a few years ago (probably on Discovrey, but maybe TLC) a program that talked about what made people attractive (face wise) as part of a story on something else, plastic surgery I think. They talked about how it's based on some ratio that's found all over the body (fingertips are 1.something times longer than the next segment). So this guy came up with a geometrical "ideal" face showing the ideal ratio. Then they used computers to compare peoples faces to the way the "ideal" face was and made a "beauty index." They used examples like the Mad Magazine guy (very low), Cindy Crawford (high), etc. Things like symetry were taken into accound (the "line" they eyes are on should be parallel to the mouth "line", and perpendicular to the nose, things should be evenly spaced, etc.) Just take that, and combine it with other things ("hour-glass shape detector", etc.) and you end up with an automatic beauty detector.

Just my 0.02, FWIW.