I decided to test the Celebrity Face Recognition program that I blogged about yesterday, so here's what I did: I went to the Forbes.com Celebrity 100 list and pulled off a bunch of celebrities from the top of the list. Then I went and found a good picture (full frontal face shot) on Google Images and fed it to the Face Recognition software. Ideally, it would match the celebrity with him/herself given that it's, well you know, the same person and all.

So here are the results. These are in the format of:

Picture I Uploaded - Highest Percentage Match (Percentage) (if not a match, whether the match occurred in any of the suggested celebrities - and if so the percentage of the actual match).

I sampled 25 celebrities. First, the matches:

David Letterman - David Letterman (100%)
Paul McCartney - Paul McCartney (100%)
Tom Hanks - Tom Hanks (100%)
Steven Spielberg - Steven Spielberg (99%)
Oprah Winfrey - Oprah Winfrey (90%)
50 Cent - 50 Cent (76%)
Brad Pitt - Brad Pitt (76%)
Johnny Depp - Johnny Depp (76%)
Donald Trump - Donald Trump (76%)
Celine Dion - Celine Dion (75%)
George Lucas - George Lucas (74%)
Jerry Seinfeld - Jerry Seinfeld (75%)
Tiger Woods - Tiger Woods (67%)
Peter Jackson - Peter Jackson (64%)

14 out of 25, or 56%. Not too shabby, although only three were perfect, 100% matches (with Spielberg at a very close 99%). Then there were two that mismatched, but eventually got it right at lower percentages:

Tom Cruise - Dean R. Koontz (73%) (Y - 64%)
Jay Leno - Wesley Clark (64%) (Y - 51%)

And the remaining nine, with some rather entertaining wrong guesses:

Muhammad Ali - Billy Zane (61%) (N)
Bruce Springsteen - Emma Watson (64%) (N)
Dr. Phil - Daniel Day Lewis (70%) (N)
Elton John - Bill Gates (71%) (N)
Howard Stern - Brian May (58%) (N)
Kobe Bryant - Andriy Shevchenko (66%) (N)
Michael Jordan - John Coltrane (72%) (N)
Phil Mickelson - Rudolf Steiner (64%) (N)
Simon Cowell - Mel Gibson (70%) (N)

I particularly like Bill Gates for Elton John, Mel Gibson for Simon Cowell, and Emma Watson (?) for Bruce Springsteen.