Digital Images and Turing Tests
One of my favorite blogs, Marginal Revolution, pointed to a digital beauty contest here. The imagery is pretty amazing - this, for example, can hardly be discerned from a photo of a real person.
This imagery reminded me of the old Turing test. I don't hear much about Turing tests nowadays, which is odd, because we are so close to having systems that will pass it. (Jerry Pournelle, in the old Chaos Manner columns in Byte, use to write a lot about Turing tests). In a Turing test, a person is connected in some blind manner to another entity, and they have to determine if it is a machine or a live human. Having a computer pass a Turing test means that a human, in interacting with it blindly, could not discern that it was not another human. In the same way, one could propose a Turing test for digital imagery like the one above, ie is it Live or is it Memorex?
By the way, no one asked me, but in my mind the reigning beauty queen of digital imagery is still Aki from the otherwise forgettable computer-animated movie Final Fantasy.
