Microsoft’s ‘How Old’ website guesses your age

A FEW weeks ago it was whether that dress was white and gold or blue and black.

Clockwise from top left: Ruth Davidson, Willie Rennie, Jim Murphy and Nicola Sturgeon. Picture: Contributed

This time, it’s Microsoft’s ‘How Old’ website.

Initially set up as a ‘test’ site, the developers behind it established How-Old.net using Microsoft’s new Face detection software.

A statement from the team read: “We sent email to a group of several hundred people asking them to try the page for a few minutes and give us feedback – optimistically hoping that at least 50 people would give it a shot.

Robert the Bruce, whose age was correctly guessed by the Robot. Picture: Contributed

“We monitored our real time analytics dashboard to track usage and, within a few minutes, the number of people using the site vastly exceeded the number of people we had sent our email to.

“We were shocked. Within a few hours, over 35,000 users had hit the page from all over the world (about 29k of them from Turkey, as it turned out – apparently there were a bunch of tweets from Turkey mentioning this page).”

So there you have it.

Using the hashtag #HowOldRobot, people have been posting screenshots of themselves, along with the age the How Old website estimated.

We decided to put some of the more familiar faces from the Scottish political sphere through the How-Old.net website. We suspect Nicola Sturgeon and Ruth Davidson will be fairly chuffed, but Willie Rennie and Jim Murphy might not be so pleased.

The Robot estimated that the First Minister and leader of the SNP is 36 - a good eight years younger than her 44 years - while Scottish Conservative leader Ruth Davidson (36 in real life) was estimated to be a youthful 27.

But Scottish Labour leader Jim Murphy was incredibly estimated to be 65 years old - nearly two decades older than his 47 years.

And spare a thought for Scottish Liberal Democrat leader Willie Rennie - the same age as Murphy at 47 - who the Robot guessed to be 71 years old.

However, when we put a picture of a statue of Robert the Bruce through the software, it guessed at 54 - the exact same age Bruce is believed to have been when he died in 1329.

How old does the Robot think you are?