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Environment plays a large role in facial appearance. Weight, diet, habitual emotional expressions, facial hair, to say nothing of acne, injuries, facial exercis

by jqm 12y ago

Environment plays a large role in facial appearance. Weight, diet, habitual emotional expressions, facial hair, to say nothing of acne, injuries, facial exercises (for the muscles in the face) or reconstructive surgery. Maybe they could divine how close the eyes are or how big the nose is... but even that doesn't seem terribly accurate from these picture. I suppose the technique will get better soon enough, but I doubt anything approaching publicly recognizable accuracy will be achieved by this method alone.

crimsonalucard 12y ago
The inaccuracy can't be solely attributed to environment. Many identical twins who share identical DNA that are separated at birth still share remarkably similar facial features. If two faces generated by identical strands of DNA in the real world remain identical, despite being grown in different environments then an accurate simulation of DNA should reproduce an accurate face regardless of environment. The inaccuracy arrives from the black box statistical process they use to generate the face. They don't know the full story behind how billions of strands of DNA can scaffold a physical face made out of billions of cells, nerves and blood vessels. Instead they just measure a bunch of faces relate it back to certain known attributes in the DNA and then generate a face. This process will always be inaccurate. In short they treat the system like a black box and build a simulation of the black box by only establishing correlations between input and output. Imagine if some alien race used this type of process in attempt to analyze the linux operating system running on a computer. They measure the electrical output of each pixel in the monitor and they find statistical correlations between pixel configurations in the monitor and the arrangement of bits in the cpu register. Using this process the Aliens can only gain a very flawed understanding of what's actually happening.
dvanduzer 12y ago
There isn't really room for anything between this method and outright cloning, is there?

by jqm 12y ago

crimsonalucard 12y ago

The inaccuracy can't be solely attributed to environment. Many identical twins who share identical DNA that are separated at birth still share remarkably similar facial features. If two faces generated by identical strands of DNA in the real world remain identical, despite being grown in different environments then an accurate simulation of DNA should reproduce an accurate face regardless of environment. The inaccuracy arrives from the black box statistical process they use to generate the face. They don't know the full story behind how billions of strands of DNA can scaffold a physical face made out of billions of cells, nerves and blood vessels. Instead they just measure a bunch of faces relate it back to certain known attributes in the DNA and then generate a face. This process will always be inaccurate. In short they treat the system like a black box and build a simulation of the black box by only establishing correlations between input and output. Imagine if some alien race used this type of process in attempt to analyze the linux operating system running on a computer. They measure the electrical output of each pixel in the monitor and they find statistical correlations between pixel configurations in the monitor and the arrangement of bits in the cpu register. Using this process the Aliens can only gain a very flawed understanding of what's actually happening.

dvanduzer 12y ago

There isn't really room for anything between this method and outright cloning, is there?