(ECNS) -- "Water Brother" Wang Yuheng beat robot Mark, dubbed the "Chinese AlphaGo", in a human face recognition contest held in Hangzhou, Zhejiang Province on Thursday, according to local newspaper Youth Times.
Wang earned his nickname "Water Brother" after successfully telling the difference between 520 glasses of water of the same quality and source during a recent TV show "Super Brain", while Mark was developed by Ant Financial, the Internet finance affiliate of Alibaba Group.
In the contest, the recognition limits of Wang and Mark were challenged as they tried to match 50 popular online beauties, both in person and by using photos.
Before the contest began, the mother of one of the women had tried to identify her daughter on the photo wall, but admitted defeat after 10 minutes of trying.
"Plastic surgery combined with the beauty effects offered by selfie apps made it impossible for the biological mother to recognize her own daughter," commented a netizen while watching a live webcast of the show.
Mark won the first round as it took six minutes less than Wang to recognize the photos of three of the girls from a total of 150.
In the second round, the number of photos was increased to 300. Both succeeded, but Wang spent one minute less than Mark at the task.
The third round required them to figure out which were the childhood photos of one or two of the girls. Wang spent only 21 minutes and 48 seconds, successfully identifying one and mistaking another, while Mark made mistakes on both despite spending a longer time -- 28 minutes and 2 seconds.
Pi Dong, a senior expert with Ant Financial, said it was not so important who won the contest, as Wang viewed three-dimensional human faces while Mark made decisions based on two-dimensional pictures taken by photographers. The most important thing, he said, was that the funny contest would help the general public better understand human face recognition technology.
