This is Scientific American's 60 Second Science.

I'm Christopher Intagiyata.

Google and Facebook both do a nice job identifying your friends and photos,

a testament to how good machines have gotten at studying human

faces. But how well would an algorithm fare when pitted against a forensic

facial examiner, the experts that

testify in court. Well it turns out that the best algorithm is comparable to the best humans.

Jonathan Phillips, a facial recognition scientist at the National Institute of

Standards and Technology.

He and his colleagues presented 20 very difficult image pairs to human experts and a range of algorithms,

and the most up-to-date algorithms did indeed perform as well as the skilled humans.

But when Phillips and his team asked for input from two humans or a human and an algorithm,

it was the combined judgment of humans and machines that won out,

providing near perfect results,

which suggests that pooled strengths and weaknesses of human brains and computer code

add up to superior accuracy.

The studies in the proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

Philip says it's now up to the facial recognition community to use these findings to

improve the tests in real world settings.

And don't worry, human recognizers

won't be out of a job anytime soon.

Just because an algorithm says,

...