Quote Originally Posted by OC Richard View Post
For sure that's what computers are good at, storing and accessing vast amounts of data.

I don't doubt that it could be done. The devil is in programming the thing to recognise the right things.

For example, it would have to be able to recognise a wide, but not too wide, range of colours as being equivalent for the purposes of tartan recognition.

This throws off humans often enough! How many would be able to see all these kilts as being the same tartan?

(It's Bruce of Kinnaird.)
I'm coresponding with an absolute wizard when it comes to Apple ecosystem information technology. At first he assumed that "Machine Learning" rather than a "Large Language Model" could be used, but he actually delved into how the registry is constructed and concluded (as you so nicely just demonstrated) that "appearance" would never be enough to identify a tartan. His summary analysis statement concluded

" I'm not sure what you think AI or ML might contribute: you can't map between appearance and thread count. All those lovely old books showing examples of different tartans are largely irrelevant, as you can't judge by the way they look, just as you can't catalogue a person's genome from their face."

And, of course, that's not the end of the issue. I would guess that the number of times some INDIVIDUAL sees someone else wearing a kilt he admires and would like a kilt in the same tartan for himself dramatically exceeds the number of times someone is playing with a computer program that can create a new tartan description hoping to register it, and many, many of the "fashion" tartans are not registered but are still protected somehow by intellectual property law.

And it's also interesting that in the instant case, the selfsame guy who spends a great deal of time plumbing the historical register was the first to recognize the tartan I inquired about, AND did so BASED SOLELY on its appearance!