Slashdot Mirror
Flickr Search Hack Powered by Mouse-Made Doodles
Carl Bialik from WSJ writes "Retrievr gives budding artists an impractical but addictive way to find photographs on Flickr: a search engine powered exclusively by mouse-made doodles. From the article: 'Retrievr, Mr. Langreiter says, "doesn't look at specific forms." Art history buffs might like to think of it as photo-search by way of Impressionism. The Retrievr engine dissects a photo like a gallery connoisseur who lost his bifocals: It focuses on regions of colors rather than specific shapes and lines. "It is, actually, a simple scheme," says Mr. Langreiter. Retrievr creates and stores a compact representation of each photo in its database. The system pulls only the most important features — broad shapes, blocks of color and spatial relationships between different colored areas — out of detailed images to create shorthand approximations of every photo. (The storage mechanism extracts the 120 "strongest" features from an image to create something called a "wavelet transform," which contains much less data than the photo itself and facilitates lightning-fast searches.)'"
I think we just made the world record for the most number of boobies sketched out on the internet simultaneously.
Task Mangler
20 minutes of expert artistry
are there no nipples on flickr?
Hmmm... Think about the combination of this and online dating sites! Especially if I could upload a target photo instead of sketching! ... I think I have some old Cindy Crawford JPGs laying around here somewhere (*dream on*).
It's powered by "mouse-made doodles" and apparently you're not doodling enough. :)
In its current incarnation, Retrievr runs on a single computer.
Ow. The Slashdotting. It hurts.
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To find Van Goghs, draw a whirlpool.
To find Pollocks, draw a can of paint.
To find Warhols, draw four cans of paint.
To find modern art sculptures, throw the tablet against a wall.
Okay, queue the slashdot mouse jokes.
First they created mice who don't age.
Not realizing what they were doing, they placed live human brain cells in the mouse's brain.
Then they made the mouse always happy, and gave it its own complete genetic map.
Suddenly we find a new mouse species.
And now they can search the web better than humans. Will someone please welcome our new overlords?
I, for one, would like to welcome our new, genetically perfected, websearching, mouse overlords. On the other hand, they haven't done any of these things on their own yet, so, obviously they don't have AI yet.
A single mound of molten slag, you mean.
Cool! Amazing Toys.