Thinking Machines

Earlier this year, Facebook created a facial recognition system with 97.25% accuracy when it comes to looking at two different photos and saying whether they show the same person, regardless of whether different lighting or camera angles are used. A few months later, a Hong Kong university smashed this record: beating the human threshold for the first time with 99.15% accuracy. Human recognition, by comparison, is 97.5% for the same standardised test.