This is Scientific American 60 Second Science.

I'm Christopher Intagiyata.

What sort of scenery do you find most appealing?

Researchers in the UK asked volunteers that question through an online photo rating game,

and the result was sort of what you'd expect.

It's like the beautiful mountains, you know, the abundant greenery,

beautiful like water features like lakes and oceans.

Chanuki Sarasota, a data scientist at the Warwick Business School.

She says the more surprising finding was that human-built structures like churches and towers and cottages, could enhance the perception of the

beauty of a scene, and big expanses of green grass like athletic fields didn't actually

rate that highly. But what they did next is where the data science comes in. They fed a computer

160,000 photographs rated through the online game and they taught the machine to break each image

into the scenic elements it contained, like snowy mountains and waterfalls, crosswalks and construction sites, and then they presented the computer with a challenge.

They asked it to rate the scenic beauty of other photos it had never seen before.

And it actually did pretty well at estimating the average crowd-source consensus of beauty.

The studies in the journal Royal Society Open Science.

As smart as it is, the scenery-loving computer

probably won't be putting tour guides out of business.

Actually, I think it can help tour guides,

because what's interesting is that I think it can actually uncover places that we didn't necessarily know about that might have not been that popular.

And Sarasota says the system might also help city planners more objectively evaluate the scenic beauty of new urban developments.

We can also now look at how we might be able to design cities that people find more beautiful and people might want to actually spend more time in.

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