Researchers in the U.K. trained computers to rate photos of parks and cities for what humans consider to be their scenic beauty. Christopher Intagliata reports.

英国的研究者训练计算机以人类的审美评价公园和城市的照片。克里斯托弗·因塔利亚塔报道。

撰文/播音：克里斯托弗·因塔利亚塔（Christopher Intagliata）

翻译：郭鑫鹏

审校：郭晓

What sort of scenery do you find most appealing? Researchers in the U.K. asked volunteers that question, through an online photo-rating game, and the result was sort of what you'd expect. "Beautiful mountains, abundant greenery, beautiful water features like lakes and oceans." Chanuki Seresinhe, a data scientist at the Warwick Business School.

怎样的风景最吸引你？英国的研究者们通过一个线上照片评分游戏调查了志愿者们对这个问题的看法，而结果和你预期的差不多。“壮丽的山脉，茂盛的绿色植物，湖泊和海洋等美丽的水景。”华威商学院数据科学家Chanuki Seresinhe说。

She says the more surprising finding was that human-built structures—churches and towers and cottages—could enhance the perception of the beauty of a scene. And big expanses of green grass—like athletic fields—didn't actually rate that highly.

她说令人更加惊喜的发现是，那些人造建筑——教堂、塔和乡间别墅——可以增强人们对美景的感知。而广阔的绿草地——像是运动场——排名却不高。

What they did next is where the data science comes in: They fed a computer 160,000 photographs rated through the online game. And they taught the machine to break each image into the scenic elements it contained. Snowy mountains, waterfalls, crosswalks and construction sites.

他们接下来要做的是与数据科学相关的事：他们把这些通过线上游戏排序得到的160000张照片导入电脑。然后他们教电脑把每张图片分解成其中包含的风景元素：白雪皑皑的山脉、瀑布、人行横道和建筑工地。

Then they presented the computer with a challenge: they asked it to rate the scenic beauty of other photos it had never seen before. And it actually did pretty well at estimating the average crowd-sourced consensus of beauty. The study is in the journal Royal Society Open Science. [Seresinhe CI, Preis T, Moat, Using deep learning to quantify the beauty of outdoor places]

然后他们向计算机提出了一个挑战任务：对另外一些照片中的美景进行评分，而计算机之前从未见过这些照片。结果表明它在评估平均大众审美共识上做得相当不错。这项研究发表在期刊《英国皇家学会开放科学》上。

As smart as it is, the scenery-loving computer probably won't be putting tour guides out of business. "Actually I think it can help tour guides. I think it can actually maybe uncover places we didn't know about that might have not been that popular.”

虽然这个热爱风景的计算机这么聪明，但是它可能并不会让导游失业。“实际上，我认为它能够帮助导游们。我认为其实它或许能够帮助我们发现一些不为人所知、不那么受欢迎的地方。”

And Seresinhe says the system might also help city planners more objectively evaluate the scenic beauty of new urban developments. "We can also now look at how to design cities that people find more beautiful, and people might want to actually spend more time in."

Seresinhe说这个系统或许还能帮助城市规划者们更客观地评价新发展城市中的美景。“我们现在也能考虑如何设计出人们觉得更美丽的城市，这样人们便希望花更多时间居住其中。“

Assuming, that is, the computer doesn't become truly intelligent… and, like humans, starts spitting out subjective opinions entirely its own.

也就是说，假设计算机并没有变得真正智能化，而且它像人类一样，开始吐槽完全属于自己的主观看法。

—Christopher Intagliata