“It depends whether we mean ‘lookalike to a human’ or ‘lookalike to facial recognition software’,” says David Aldous, a statistician at U.C. There may be another way – and it all comes down to what you mean by a doppelganger. In any case, you probably won’t remember the last time you clocked an uncanny resemblance based on the length of someone’s ears. The study relied on exact measurements if your doppelganger’s ears are 59 mm but yours are 60, your likeness wouldn’t count. Far from everyone having a long-lost “twin”, in Teghan’s view it’s more likely no one does.īut that’s not quite the end of the story. When you multiply probabilities together, the chances of something actually happening disappear very, very quickly.īesides, the wide array in human guises is undoubtedly down to more than eight traits. But already by the second letter the chance has shrunk to one in 676 (26 x 26) and by the end of the fourth line (22 letters) it’s one in 13 quintillion. Ignoring grammar, the monkey has a one in 26 chance of correctly typing the first letter of Macbeth. It’s a mathematical certainty, but reversing the problem reveals just how staggeringly long the monkey would have to toil. The results can be explained by the famed infinite monkey problem: sit a monkey in front of a typewriter for long enough and eventually it will surely write the Complete Works of William Shakespeare by randomly hitting, biting and jumping up and down on the keys on the board. Next she calculated the probability that two peoples’ faces would match. military personnel and the help of colleagues from the University of Adelaide, Teghan painstakingly analysed the faces of nearly four thousand individuals, measuring the distances between key features such as the eyes and ears. Then last year Teghan Lucas set out to test the risk of mistaking an innocent double for a killer.Īrmed with a public collection of photographs of U.S. In fact until recently no one had ever even tried to find out. The notion has gripped the popular imagination for millennia – it was the subject of one of the oldest known works of literature – inspiring the work of poets and scaring queens to death.īut is there any truth in it? We live on a planet of over seven billion people, so surely someone else is bound to have been born with your face? It’s a silly question with serious implications – and the answer is more complicated than you might think. He woke up the next morning with a hangover and an Argentinian radio show on the phone – the picture had gone viral.įolk wisdom has it that everyone has a doppelganger somewhere out there there’s a perfect duplicate of you, with your mother’s eyes, your father’s nose and that annoying mole you’ve always meant to have removed. Later their paths crossed again at a bar and they accepted that the universe wanted them to have a drink. And that’s when I took the selfie.” The uncanny events continued when Douglas arrived at his hotel, only to find the same double at the check-in desk. “The whole plane looked at us and laughed. He turned around and he had my face,” says Neil Douglas, who was on his way to a wedding in Ireland when it happened. “I was the last one on the plane and there was someone in my seat, so I asked the guy to move. And then, one day your illusions are smashed. Underpinning it all is the assurance that your looks are unique. Your face: it’s so tangled up with your identity, soon it may be all you need to unlock your smartphone, access your office or buy a house. It’s how you’re recognised by old friends on the street, even after years apart. It’s how criminals are identified in a line-up.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |