Wired News covers Eric Bonabeau's Hunch Engine, a technology that uses human selection to evolve a genetic algorithm that lets computers sort data by non-quantifiable terms, like "wistfulness" or "beauty." Eric presented last week at the O'Reilly Emerging Tech conference in San Diego and, as always, was a mind-blower:
When the user starts the hunch engine he is presented with a seed — a starting point — and a set of mutations. The user selects mutations that look promising in his eyes, and the application uses that selection to generate another set of mutations, continuing in that fashion until the user is satisfied with what he sees.
Call it guided natural selection, where the selector for fitness is what looks good to the human in front of the monitor…
Bonabeau is trying to build applications compelling enough that people will take the time and get the results they want. One of his first applications, demonstrated at the O'Reilly conference, is a filter for images that allows a naive user to improve digital photos without understanding complex tools like Adobe Photoshop, by choosing from mutations of the picture to make it better. "My grandmother doesn't know anything about improving pictures," says Bonabeau, "but she knows which pictures of her grandchildren she likes."
