You're in danger of missing the point too far in the other direction. The system just returns yes/no as to whether an image has a face in it, and if it was hard

You're in danger of missing the point too far in the other direction. The system just returns yes/no as to whether an image has a face in it, and if it was hard-coded to respond "no" it would score 64.8%. Obviously this is extremely impressive work, and given that Google gives away 1e9 core hours a year, I'd like to see how much further they can push this network (which only used 16e3x3x24 ~ 1e6 hours). But this isn't like scoring 80% in a written exam. I'm also impressed by how readable the paper was. Apart from a few paragraphs of detailed maths this should be accessible to anyone who's read the wikipedia article on neural networks. http://googleblog.blogspot.com/2011/04/1-billion-computing-core-hours-for.html http://googleblog.blogspot.com/2011/04/1-billion-computing-c...