The Human Eye

[foolswisdom]

So I've been reading this book, it's called "How the Mind Works" or some such inane title like that. It's really quite an interesting book, and within the first few pages it got me thinking about sight. Humans are very very pattern-based people. The alphabet is full of patterns, there are patterns on the road when we drive, patterns in music --

Comments

[zaxer]

Good post overall, but don't ignore your CS!! You're not going to have to make 1 trillion or whatever comparisons because you can make a tree of this sort of information, automatically even - what colors are dominant, perhaps, or what type of shape it is, what the distribution of colors is - I'm not sure exactly what sort of tree you'd use but any sort of vaguely binary tree will get you from N to logN, and you can't argue with that...

I think that's got to be what our brain does to a degree. It's not going to look at a cello and go, "Is it the ocean? No, not blue enough. The sky? No, not blue enough either. How about the sun? Nope... Stop sign? Human? (etc, until finally) "hey, it's a cello"! It's going to go, "Wood, highly polished, thin metal objects on the front, somewhat smaller than a human, edges in the right places and everything else checks - yup, cello."

Which is kind of pattern matching as you were referring to at the beginning, but you didn't apply it to the computer.

[savfan104]

And the brain, I'm sure, takes lots of nice fun shortcuts to cut away some processing...

The infamous experiment - people were shown a video of two teams playing some ball game and told to count the number of times that the ball was passed by one team or something. Except in the middle of the video, either a gorilla or a woman with an umbrella passes through the screen, and some large portion of the people watching don't even notice her/it.

So if we try to have a computer identify everything it sees, we would be doing much more than the human brain, because the brain seems to have nice fun shortcuts to avoid even thinking about some things.

I suppose that means that whoever does AI gets to play around with fun optimization algorithms ;-p

[foolswisdom]

these are both good points.

Peter's I hadn't put a lot of thought into yet -- the idea did occur to me, but I didn't really think there was a good way of organizing things into a tree like that; although I suppose something like what you'd said would work pretty nicely.

And Max, the book i'm reading is discussing how the brain optimizes stuff like this; but I haven't gotten far enough in to comment on it sufficiently, which is why I didn't.

[cptjanewaypi110]

there's a lot more in life than just road signs.

Annoying, no?

[avenger337]

very.