Invisible <voi### [at] devnull> wrote:
> Try walking across the room. Trust me, this requires some pretty damned
> precise computations. Don't believe me? Drink some alcohol, and try the
> same task. Hard, isn't it? You know robotics engineers have struggled
> for years to make a bipedal robot that can perform the same apparently
> trivial task?
>
> Balance is hard. A few grams one side or the other and you fall over.
> That sounds pretty precise to me. And yet people ride bicycles. How many
> robots have you seen ride a bicycle?
>
> You say people can't recognise a familiar face with /certainty/, but I
> reject that. A computer might look at a face and rate the probability of
> it belonging to various people, but when I see a person I know, I *know*
> exactly who I'm looking at. Instantly. What's more, when I see a
> computer-generated image of Davy Jones, I recognise it as resembling
> Bill Nighy. How many computer facial recognition programs can do that?
> Again, sounds pretty damned accurate to me.
>
> There are computer programs that compute a "fingerprint" of a piece of
> music, and can supposedly recognise the same recording that has been
> altered slightly. But a human listener can recognise the same piece of
> music performed by a completely different group, and a totally unrelated
> style. No computer can do that. And it's not just that humans use more
> "fuzzy" and less "precise" matching to do their recognition; if that
> were the case, the matching would just be really unreliable. But
> actually, humans are REALLY FRIGGING GOOD at this stuff.

You have a grave misconception here:
As has been said before, the human brain is anything but precise. It actually is
very very good at correcting errors and adapting to them. Walking
across a room is not a precalculated series of movements like it would be for
most robots. The brain is constantly regulating all your movements dependent on
the millions of information it receives from your body.
Whenever anything happens that's not quite as it was "planned" it will just
change the movement slightly without your conciousness even noticing.

Facial recognition is much the same. The human brain has dedicated structures
for exactly that purpose. If they are damaged, the person suddenly can't
recognize faces anymore. I once saw a report about someone having a stroke and
losing this ability. He was unable to relearn this ability, because the
"dedicated hardware" could not be "emulated in software", so to speak. Those
dedicated structures have evolved over millenia for this one single purpose. You
cannot expect a computer to perform with the same efficiency on a general
purpose processor.

And about accuracy of facial recognition:
How sure you are about recognizing someone depends largely on how well you know
that person and if there's other persons you know that look alike. If someone
has a distinct face than your confidence of recognition is high. But if you look
at identical twins you'll be less sure of recognizing them correctly.
So how can you say you are 100% sure you recognized someone? It's just that your
confidence is high enough for you to think you are 100% sure.

Regards
Aydan

Post a reply to this message