Comments on: Are You Human? Prove it!

By: Doug

Doug — Wed, 23 Aug 2006 23:20:01 +0000

I’d say the latter. I mean, most of the people supporting all forms of titillation-for-sale are men, right? It’s probably the same on hotornot.com.

Perhaps, in the interest of political correctness, it could be modified to be “which of these puppies is cute?” or something like that.

By: Megan

Megan — Wed, 23 Aug 2006 23:17:39 +0000

Now that I look at it more closely, I see they actually use the HOTorNOT API. Does that mean the pictures come from hotornot.com, too? Maybe they are using some empirical data for their hot designations, and I’m just out of touch with the common woman.

Or maybe most of the people rating men on hotornot.com are actually men.

By: Megan

Megan — Wed, 23 Aug 2006 23:09:22 +0000

Okay, I went to the site and I have an observation. For the women, it’s easy–I was human every time. But for the men, I kept getting die robot die. I had no idea which of the men were supposed to be hot! I didn’t see a single screen that included three men *I’d* call hot; the vast majority seemed neither hot nor conspicuously unhot.

So is the problem that I have bad taste? Or is it that female standards of beauty are more universally beaten into us in American culture? Or is it just that the guys (I assume it was guys) who put this together paid a lot more attention to the pictures of women.

My guess is a combination of the latter two, a little weighted toward the last. It looks like the creators went out of their way to ensure an obvious contrast between attractive and unattractive women, but just threw a bunch of guys together and said hey, let’s call some of these hot, because we have to.

Or maybe the “hot” guys are just the ones with shaved and oiled chests? Is that what they think women really go for?

By: Tom

Tom — Wed, 23 Aug 2006 22:57:19 +0000

WOW! This is great — in the past three days I’ve been reading and re-reading Alan Turing’s original writings on his test for intelligent machines. It’s fascinating, and not without humor. The logic is completely basic at every level, but builds to an incredibly intricate lattice of conditionals and overlapping programming-vs-intelligence confusion almost immediately. It’s quite interesting, really. I can’t believe this happens to come up now on your blog, too.

Jinx, buy me a Coke (and all that).