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Do You Have A Living Doppelgänger? (bbc.com)
HughPickens.com writes: Folk wisdom has it that everyone has a doppelganger; somewhere out there there's a perfect duplicate of you, with your mother's eyes, your father's nose and that annoying mole you've always meant to have removed. Now BBC reports that last year Teghan Lucas set out to test the hypothesis that everyone has a living double. Armed with a public collection of photographs of U.S. military personnel and the help of colleagues from the University of Adelaide, Lucas painstakingly analyzed the faces of nearly four thousand individuals, measuring the distances between key features such as the eyes and ears. Next she calculated the probability that two peoples' faces would match. What she found was good news for the criminal justice system, but likely to disappoint anyone pining for their long-lost double: the chances of sharing just eight dimensions with someone else are less than one in a trillion. Even with 7.4 billion people on the planet, that's only a one in 135 chance that there's a single pair of doppelgangers. Lucas says this study has provided much-needed evidence that facial anthropometric measurements are as accurate as fingerprints and DNA when it comes to identifying a criminal. "The use of video surveillance systems for security purposes is increasing and as a result, there are more and more instances of criminals leaving their 'faces' at a scene of a crime," says Ms Lucas. "At the same time, criminals are getting smarter and are avoiding leaving DNA or fingerprint traces at a crime scene." But that's not the whole story. The study relied on exact measurements; if your doppelganger's ears are 59mm but yours are 60mm, your likeness wouldn't count. "It depends whether we mean 'lookalike to a human' or 'lookalike to facial recognition software,'" says David Aldous. If fine details aren't important, suddenly the possibility of having a lookalike looks a lot more realistic. It depends on the way faces are stored in the brain: more like a map than an image. To ensure that friends and acquaintances can be recognized in any context, the brain employs an area known as the fusiform gyrus to tie all the pieces together. This holistic 'sum of the parts' perception is thought to make recognizing friends a lot more accurate than it would be if their features were assessed in isolation. Using this type of analysis, and judging by the number of celebrity look-alikes out there, unless you have particularly rare features, you may have literally thousands of doppelgangers. "I think most people have somebody who is a facial lookalike unless they have a truly exceptional and unusual face," says Francois Brunelle has photographed more than 200 pairs of doppelgangers for his I'm Not a Look-Alike project. "I think in the digital age which we are entering, at some point we will know because there will be pictures of almost everyone online.
I'm an asshole, why would I want to meet another me?
Table-ized A.I.
the chances of sharing just eight dimensions with someone else are less than one in a trillion. Even with 7.4 billion people on the planet, that's only a one in 135 chance that there's a single pair of doppelgangers.
Francois Brunelle has photographed more than 200 pairs of doppelgangers
Maybe his math stinks and he decided to pretend that all the variables are independent because that's easier than reality.
Don't waste your vote! Vote for whoever you want, unless you live in a swing state it won't matter anyways
All ACs look alike to me.
Does that make me racist?
John McAfee 'It was like that time I hired that Bangkok prostitute; to do my taxes, while I fucked my accountant'
My mom always told me "Son, you are one in a million."
At the current population rate, there are 7000 of me.
Be afraid.
I'm a good cook. I'm a fantastic eater. - Steven Brust
From approx 1984 - 1995, I worked in various hotels & restaurants in a big city and I lost count of the number of people who mistook me for another guy who also worked in the biz - one person came right up to me, shook my hand and said it was great to see me again and how he'd enjoyed working with me for several years.
I had no idea who the hell he was or who he thought I was. But after that, I started being much nicer to people because my double seemed to have left a really positive impression on people in a rough & competitive business so I thought he was doing me a favor and I should at least try to return it.
Since I left that city and got out of hospitality, it's never happened again.
Pain is merely failure leaving the body
"Folk wisdom has it that everyone has a doppelganger; somewhere out there there's a perfect duplicate of you, with your mother's eyes, your father's nose and that annoying mole you've always meant to have removed."
Whose "folk wisdom" is that supposedly referring to? Because I've never even heard this ludicrous notion mentioned anywhere.
Are "researchers" so hard up for new topics anymore that they're just making crap up and pretending it existed before it sprang from their desperate (and addled) brain?
#DeleteChrome
When I was in my 20s, I was in a fast food restaurant across town from my house. Some guys started calling out a name I forget. Let's say, Mike. I eventually started looking to see who they were calling to, and was very surprised to find out it was me. The conversation from there was very surreal.
Me: Uh, sorry. I'm not Mike.
Them: LOL. What's up, man! We haven't seen you in ages.
Me: I don't think I know you.
Them: LOL. Seriously, where've you been?
Me: Uh, no, really, I don't know you. Who's Mike?
One of them, as confused as me: What are you talking about?
Me: I'm not Mike.
The guy: You're serious?
I pull out my driver's license, cover up most of it with my thumb, and show him my name. The guy mildly freaks out.
Guy: Whoa, this isn't Mike!
They all rush over to look, then stare at me like they're seeing a ghost.
Guy: We've gone to school with Mike since elementary. I swear to God you look like him. Do you have a twin?
It turns out their buddy was a year or two younger or older than me. I don't have a twin - I'm absolutely certain about that - but there's someone out there approximately my age that looks similar enough to me that his childhood friends couldn't tell the difference between us.
Dewey, what part of this looks like authorities should be involved?
I have face blindness, you insensitive clod!
To me, everybody is a doppelgänger of everybody.
Of course, if the system actually uses a resolution that accurate, it's quite likely you won't even be your own doppelganger. Retaining water would be enough to throw it off.
I'd wager that evolution and neural net learning has struck a pretty optimal balance between false positives and false negatives for this in the human brain.
Oh, and the human system definitely uses measures the researchers didn't take in this study; ever failed to recognize someone because they're not in the same context you usually see them? Heck, I once spent 2 hours on a train talking to someone I thought I sort of recognized. A day later I realized I'd been talking to a (former) CEO of one of the biggest companies in the country, but of course, I wasn't exactly used to seeing him outside TV or newspapers. Ah, well, at least he got an early insight into free software.