A person doesn't "decide" a photo is beautiful-the reaction is emotional, instinctive. So when Appu Shaji began trying to duplicate the process with code four years ago, building a program to rank photos by their beauty, he failed. A computer imaging researcher at EPFL, an engineering college in Lausanne, Switzerland, Shaji designed his software to judge photos based on composition, color saturation, and perspective, but couldn't teach it to identify the best-looking ones. "With hard rules, I wasn't able to solve the problem," he says.
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