Popular app, How Old, which attempts to use facial recognition software to guess a person’s age, has reportedly crashed after attempting to guess the age of EDM superstar Tiësto.
Reports from Microsoft, who own the app, claim that the app was able to correctly identify the ages of countless people including celebrities like Pete Burns, Joan Rivers and a piece of chewing gum, but crashed following attempts to correctly guess Tiësto’s age.
“Basically the app uses facial recognition software to guess the age and gender of a the person whose photo you’ve uploaded,” explained How Old developer, Barry Harris, who initially set up the app as a way for people to brag about how young they look. “But we’ve had a few errors like when it guessed Morgan Freeman’s age to be 735 when in actual fact his age is 734.”
“However, despite some issues, none of the faces had put as much strain on the system as Tiësto’s,” continued Mr. Harris who says that after uploading Tiësto’s picture into the app it crashed almost immediately. “The computer is designed to work instantly but Tiësto’s pic created a massive backlog as supercomputers in Microsoft’s HQ attempted to decode his age.”
“They’re used to controlling supertankers and GPS locating drones so they theoretically should be able to guess the age of a DJ with little fuss,” continued Mr. Harris. “Sure, you expect some kind of difficulty with people who’ve had plastic surgery or whose ages might be hard to determine but nothing like this.”
“Our servers exploded with the strain of trying to guess his age and gender,” he concluded. “Eventually the screen kind of froze just with a question mark for the age and a strange non-human outline for the gender which looked almost like a lizard, or some kind of giant reptile.”
