Google Now Has Dowsing Ability
March 16, 2016
People who claim to be psychic are fakes. There is not a way to predict the future, instantly locate a lost person or item, or read someone’s aura. No scientific theory has proven it exists. One of the abilities psychics purport to have is “dowsing,” the power to sense where water, precious stones or metals, and even people are hiding. Instead of relying on a suspended crystal or an angular stick, Google now claims it can identify any location based solely on images, says The Technology Review in the article, “Google Unveils Neural Network With ‘Superhuman’ Ability To Determine The Location Of Almost Any Image.”
Using computer algorithms, not magic powers, and Tobias Weyand’s programming prowess and a team of tech savvy people, they developed a way for a Google deep-learning machine to identity location pictures. Weyand and his team designed PlaNET, the too, and accomplished this by dividing the world into 26,000 square grid (sans ocean and poles) of varying sizes depending on populous areas.
“Next, the team created a database of geolocated images from the Web and used the location data to determine the grid square in which each image was taken. This data set is huge, consisting of 126 million images along with their accompanying Exif location data.
Weyand and co used 91 million of these images to teach a powerful neural network to work out the grid location using only the image itself. Their idea is to input an image into this neural net and get as the output a particular grid location or a set of likely candidates.”
With the remaining 34 million images in the data set, they tested the PlaNET to check its accuracy. PlaNET can accurately guess 3.6% images at street level, 10.1% on city level, 28.4% country of origin, and 48% of the continent. These results are very good compared to the limited knowledge that a human keeps in their head.
Weyand believes that PlaNET is able to determine the location, because it has learned new parents to recognize subtle patterns about areas that humans cannot distinguish, as it has arguably been more places than any human. What is even more amazing is how much memory PlaNET uses: only 377 MB!
When will PlaNET become available as a GPS app?
Whitney Grace, March 16, 2016
Sponsored by ArnoldIT.com, publisher of the CyberOSINT monograph
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