Wednesday, July 26, 2006

Can't you see the resemblance???


I was just about to check my e-mail for the morning when I ran across a story on the Yahoo main site about finding one’s celebrity twin, so being the curious sort that I am, I followed the link and checked out the story. The general gist of the story is that a website called MyHeritage.com will do a similarity analysis of uploaded pictures and compare facial features to those of celebrities in their database. It’ll then present the results, displaying which celebrities the user most resembles.

Sounds like it could be good for some giggles, so I uploaded a recent photo of myself. A few mouse clicks later and I have the results: Based on the picture I uploaded, I share a 56% similarity with Wilhelm Wundt and a 50% similarity with Victor Hugo. Um, yeah. Guess it must be the beard, huh? Or the fact that we both have 2 eyes, a nose and a mouth. The results were hardly convincing, so I decided to try another photo—one without the goatee.

This time the results were a bit more… um… flattering…but still completely ridiculous. According to the site, my face shares a 60% similarity to Jude Law, Carson Daley and Anatoly Karpov. Sure. So I went with one last photo to see if I could get anything that resembles consistency. ‘Twas not to be. This time, I came up with a 58% similarity to Dean Cain. I think someone needs to get their algorithm fixed.

Anyway, it’s an entertaining diversion for a few minutes, so I encourage my vast readership to check it out. Til next time…

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