Facial Recognition

Computers and machines may one day match the power of the human brain. One day.

This ideeah came about last night when I was at my children's school's meet-the-teacher night. Sitting two desks over from me was a man I immediately recognized. The last time I had seen him may very well have been in a classroom twenty-four years ago. As I remembered him, he remembered me. Name, surname, street, common friends. It all zoomed back and we were seventeen again sitting, not in our children's classroom but in our own classroom.

In less than a second I had scanned all the images and videos of my memory and had assigned the correct name to that face. A two hour movie in a high-definition format that still does not match the vision of a human can be gigabytes and gigabytes in size. How many hours of video does a forty-one year old man have recorded in his brain. How many four megabyte pictures do we each have stored away in the folds of our grey drive. Tens of thousands. How many songs do we have memorized? Thousands as well....all at ten megabytes a piece.

We are talking about terabytes of data....and....in a split second we can associate a memory to a song. A smell to day. A name to a face.

Will we we ever recreate the efficiency of nature's algorithms? The speed, the accuracy. The fault tolerance. Truly an amazing 1400 gram organ that we have between our ears.

Let me know what you think about what you have just read. Please and thanks!

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