not the face!

You might recall this fun bit of face-recognition software from a couple of years back that purported to tell you how old you looked. I was pretty sure I'd done a blog post about it at the time, but I can't find it now, so I may have just bunged a picture up on Facebook or something. Emma seems to have tested it far more exhaustively than I did, anyway. Just to check that link was still active I gave it an old Facebook profile picture (which I actually think is quite a good photo of me, taken in a beachfront ice-cream shop in Barry Island); I think I would have been 43 at the time so the result was quite gratifying, if unspectacular.

There now appears to be another link doing the rounds which allows you to upload a picture and have a piece of artificial intelligence tell you which celebrity face it resembles. As with all things this is a bit of a stunt to publicise some more serious AI development, but of course it's irresistible - who doesn't want to have it confirmed that they look like a young Paul Newman?

Wait a minute: Reid Hoffman? Who the hell is Reid Hoffman? Must be a glitch in the matrix; let's try a different picture.

Well, OK, let's have a look: Reid Hoffman is co-founder of business networking website LinkedIn and a billionaire. So what does he look like?

Well, clearly there are still some unresolved bugs in the software here - that appears to be a picture of some middle-aged fat bloke. Let's try again with a different picture - this one was taken in the Ernest Willows pub in Cardiff on a match day in about 2007.

Hmmm, well, it's different, at least. I've never heard of Michael Emerson either, but I expect Google can find me a picture.

Well, at least he's not as fat as the previous guy, though he is a bit more weaselly than I'd ideally have liked. It turns out I have seen him before, in the first Saw movie, and possibly here and there on TV as well as he seems to get about a bit. Let's have another go.

That is fairly surprising, though I suppose Michael Schumacher would have been photographed in sunglasses quite a lot, and I am leading with the chin slightly in this picture which probably makes it look a bit bigger.

This one (taken at Taupo Quads in New Zealand in early 2001) makes me wonder whether a) some sort of machine-learning may be involved whereby the algorithm recognises me as being the face from the previous picture and "remembers" that it offered up Michael Schumacher as a suggestion then, or b) whether it noticed the same tenuous resemblance as before and also spotted the four-wheeled vehicle,

Well, no four-wheeled vehicles here (this was taken a day or two after the previous picture after a trip down a hill in a zorb near Rotorua) and still with the Schumacher suggestions. Strange.

You'd think there must be some situational awareness being applied here, as I look nothing like Wayne Gretzky, but he is a man who must appear in a lot of photos featuring snow, ice and woolly hats.

Ah, fuck off with your Reid Hoffmans.

Marc Benioff is another internet entrepreneur, founder of cloud computing company Salesforce. I'm being generous with the picture as it was the only one I could find where he was wearing glasses. Also, he's fat! And he has a beard!

Time to stop depressing myself and try something different. Who does my elder daughter look like? Note that this picture was taken nine months or so ago (in a softplay area at Bluestone), before she did a faceplant onto the school playground and knocked out half of one of her front teeth and bruised the other one. So all the current searches would probably come back with Shane MacGowan or something. Uploading a photo where full dental integrity was still intact yields the following:

It turns out Angus T Jones is the kid from Two And A Half Men, which I've seen about five minutes of ever. I assume that the resemblance is supposed to be two the clean-cut kid version, rather than the straggly-bearded religious nutter he later became.