Microsoft’s Age Guessing Algorithm is a Jerk

[[Coi] Mr.CLuBBeR]

Let the mid-life crisis begin

Screw this, I'm going on a shopping spree for a convertible sports car and whatever else people buy when they have a midlife crisis. Not that I'm going through one, I'm just a little ticked at Microsoft's new website that guesses your age and gender when you upload a photo of your mug. When I tried it out with a recent photo of myself, it got the gender right (hooray!), but overshot my age by 9 years (you dirty little algorithm!).
If you upload a group photo, it will tag all the faces it recognizes with age and gender guesses. Over time, the facial recognition technology at work is supposed to improve and make more accurate assumptions, which is good because I'm far from the only one that it basically said, "You look old for your age!" To the tool's credit, it did a much better job with a different set of pics and even correctly guessed my age at the time one of my photos was taken (see thumbnail pic above).
You don't need to use your own photo -- you can choose an image from an integrated Bing Image Search and have it guess the age and gender of your favorite celebrity. Scroll through pictures of Adam Levine, for example, and you'll see a variety of ages -- from 29 to 40, based on the ones we tried (he's 36). And with Scarlett Johansson, we saw results ranging from 17 to 34 years old (she's 30). Unfortunately, it doesn't recognize characters like Chewbacca or E.T.
This all began as a fun little experiment that a couple of Microsoft engineers toyed with. They were playing with Microsoft's newly released Face detection API and expected around 50 people to respond to the test. The Internet being what it is, over 35,000 users flocked to the site within just a few hours.
If you want to give it a whirl yourself and don't mind a potentially bruised ego, head over to http://how-old.net and let us know how accurate (or inaccurate) it was.
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