Bitbutter

While watching a friend using Face Maker I noticed that what I had taken to be decorative markings of the cheeks, she understood as eyes. And the shapes that I took to be eyes, she took to be unnecessary markings. I think there's been parallel selection for two separate sets of eyes. Both sets are very widespread among the current population of faces.

Here I've edited out the lower eyes, leaving only the top set:

And here's how it looks with only the lower set of eyes:

I think that voters tend to 'see' one pair more quickly than they see the other, and that once the first pair is recognised, there's a kind of blindness towards the other pair. For instance, before I was aware of the lower set I would have interpreted the previous image as missing eyes altogether.

Which set do you consider to be the real eyes?

A long list of miracles are attributed to Sai Baba, for instance it is claimed that he 'materialised' a live monkey during an interview–he maintains that this was no conjuring trick, but that he was using devine power. Why don't I believe him? Because I believe that 'extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence', and I'm not aware of extraordinary evidence that supports Sai Baba's claim.

If James Randi were to set up a controlled test of Sai Baba's powers, and was unable to demonstrate that he is a fraud, I would assign a greater likelihood to the possibility that Sai Baba is telling the truth. But in the absence of such a test it doesn't seem premature to assume that there is nothing paranormal going on. My guess is that most of us would agree.

Which seems more likely to you:

1. The reports are true; Sai Baba performs miracles
2. There is some other explanation for the fact that thousands of people claim that he performs miracles

Which seems more likely to you:

1. The miracles that Joseph Smith (the father of Mormonism) described really happened
2. The miracles that Joseph Smith described didn't happen

Which seems more likely to you:

1. The miracles described in the Qur'an really happened
2. The Qur'anic miracles didn't really happen

Which seems more likely to you:

1. The miracles ascribed to Krisha really happened
2. Krisha's miracles didn't really happen

Which seems more likely to you:

1. The miracles described in the bible really happened
2. The biblical miracles didn't really happen

Philipp Lenssen kindly gave his permission for me to publish Face Maker, which I've just deployed. I wanted to build an online artificial selection system ever since reading about Richard Dawkins' The Blind Watchmaker programme but Face Maker is an experiment heavily inspired by Philipp's Mutating Pictures project.

A web site is a perfect place to host a project like this that deals with small incremental change. No single user is burdened with devoting hours to 'evolving' the faces. Instead the effort is massively distributed–and continues day and night. Users from all over the world work on collaboratively selecting for face-like appearances.

And participation provides its own rewards. Judging the procession of 'faces' has been strangely hypnotic while using Phillip's site and while working on my own. It's fascinating to see the eerily detailed faces emerging and it's almost tempting to wonder where they come from.

Face Maker differs from the current version of Mutating Pictures in a few ways.

1. The images are drawn using curved shapes rather than triangles
2. Both black and white shapes are used, overlapping one another
3. Images are presented next to one another, the user is invited to select the most face-like image
4. When one image 'wins' a round, the loser is removed from the database, and the winner gives birth to one child.

Continuing to borrow from Philipp's approach I plan to use this blog post to collect comments and discussion about Face Maker.

Face Maker was built in a feverish 2-day sprint with Ruby on Rails. It could be that some bugs surface, if they do, please accept my apologies in advance.

One of the original images:

Some faces that went extinct: