Researchers from Google and Stanford have apparently made great strides in image-recognition software.
Described in a very interesting New York Times article, the advances mean that software can recognise and describe the content of photographs.
To demonstrate this, the researchers chose six photos of different scenes (like the one above) and got both a human, and the software, to write a caption.
What makes the software different is that it can recognise scenes, rather than simply things, and the results are surprisingly accurate.
With regards to online dating, obviously the immediate link is that such software could one day be used to recognise what singles find attractive in each other.
However while such leaps may be years away, using similar software to discern the content of photographs could certainly be useful to dating sites.
Last month, Tinder’s Sean Rad said that one of the most powerful signs of relevance for singles on the app was the content of the photo — what they are doing, where they are or what they are wearing.
He said their team were trying to find out ways of capturing this content, and feed it back into their matching algorithm.
Read the New York Times piece here.