Wyatt Earp or Ringo Starr? Facial Recognition Meets Its Match With Old West Photos

Denny Rodman, an antiques collector in Houston, made an exciting find on Facebook's online marketplace in August. An old image of three men looked a lot like the infamous Dalton brothers, the Wild West bank robbers. He bought the photo for $100, wrote a 35-page report arguing for its authenticity, then sent the report to Bob Utley, a 91-year-old authority on the outlaws of the period. He included a facial-recognition analysis that showed strong evidence of a match. "Identifying people of generations ago by face recognition is almost always a non-starter," he wrote back.