3D-printed Rembrandt painting looks almost as good as the real thing

Bringing us one step closer to the day when computers compete directly with humans in the arts, a new painting has been created using software to mimic the style of a master. The painting, titled "The Next Rembrandt" (below), is the result of a team of developers who, with the technical support of Microsoft and backing from Dutch bank ING, sought to create an original new work "by Rembrandt" using data from his existing paintings. See also: Google's Tilt Brush artists show off the power of virtual reality art "When you want to make a new painting you have some idea of how it's going to look," said Ben Haanstra, a part of the developer team, in a press statement. "But in our case we started from basically nothing -- we had to create a whole painting using just data from Rembrandt's paintings." In order to produce the most accurate painting mimicking Rembrandt, developers created a facial recognition algorithm that identified the most common patterns used by the artist.