In the end, Microsoft told us what we have always known: it's not how old you are, but how old you look that matters, with its How-old.net (How old do I look?) using  #HowOldRobot.

But this is not what Corom Thompson and Santosh Balasubramanian, Engineers in Information Management and Machine Learning at Microsoft said they set out to do:
"We were playing with Microsoft’s newly released Face detection API’s through a webpage called http://how-old.net. This page lets users upload a picture and have the API predict the age and gender of any faces recognized in that picture. 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. 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."

Well, it almost broke the internet, even if it did not quite reach the obsessive virality of the black vs the blue dress. That people are not always as old as they look (nor that they always look as old as they are) was nicely demonstrated by the #HowOldRobot as the results, depending on the photograph chosen, were deceptively close to the actual age of the people concerned in  some cases, give or take a  decade – or two. No wonder, the website almost broke Twitter – or perhaps it was the other way around?

We, on our part, decided to use this new technology to solve the eternal mysteries that we have spent nights awake puzzling over, and must admit that we are heart-broken to find that the ghost who walks and can never die is actually no older than the former future prime minister of India.



We give you the rest of our findings without any comment:






In some cases, though, early intimations of a break-through turned out only to be a delusion:

For even Microsoft seemed to be left confused when it came to guessing the real age of Shahid Afridi:




When it came to politics, everyone, it seemed, wanted to have "chhapan inch nu chhaati":





But, clearly, not all measured up.



But there was no confusion about who our youth leader should be:


And if you thought that 13 is too immature, well, he did not take any time in appearing to have suddenly grown up as well, as these photographs affirm:



In some cases, though, we must admit, that we were left even more mystified than ever before:






Not a surprise, therefore, that  #HowOldRobot started trending on Twitter as soon as people realised what a good distraction it was turning out to be on a slow news day with nothing else to outrage about: