Tomorrow is Today

Algorithm Analyzing Artistic Style Identifies Same Patterns as Art Historians

Computer scientists Computer scientists… have developed a program that analyzes paintings in a manner similar to how expert art historians perform their analysis, and conducted an experiment that showed that machines can outperform untrained humans in the analysis of fine art.

In the experiment, the researchers used approximately 1, 000 paintings of 34 well-known artists, and let the computer algorithm analyze the similarity between them based solely on the visual content of the paintings, and without any human guidance.

Surprisingly, the computer provided a network of similarities between painters that is largely in agreement with the perception of art historians.

I take this research with a grain of salt: the algorithm seems to have detected the patterns it was designed to detect.  I would have been more excited if it drew a new connection that human art experts found interesting.

(via Can computers understand art? | KurzweilAI)