Social psychologists have long known that humans make snap judgements about each other based on nothing more than the way we look and, in particular, our faces. We use these judgements to determine whether a new acquaintance is trustworthy or clever or dominant or sociable or humorous and so on. These decisions may or may not be right and are by no means objective, but they are consistent. Given the same face in the same conditions, people tend to judge it in the same way. And that raises an interesting possibility.

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Drawing an accurate sketch of a person's face is an art that is hard for most people to master. But it turns out to be relatively easy for computers. Various programs exist for converting images into line drawings. That often produces a decent start, although these systems can have difficulty with shadows and high contrast. A more promising approach is to use machine-vision algorithms that rely on neural networks to extract features from an image and use these to produce a sketch.