Photo recognising app suffers British amnesia

A new app that claims to recognise "almost any photo", however, does not come up with the right answers pertaining to anything British.

Recently, researchers at Wolfram|Alpha launched its 'Language Image Identification Project' that claims to identify tens of thousands of objects.

But when faced with iconic British imagery, the American-built software confused them for parts of the body, household items and even toys, MailOnline reported.

Fair enough, the tool recognised York Minster cathedral was a church and said that the Cutty Sark was a brig and HMS Victory in Portsmouth is simply a "watercraft".

But not all things. When a Tower of London picture was fed into it, the programme failed to name it even as a "tower", despite the fact the Tower of London has a clue in its name.

Instead, the landmark structure was just called a "house". The Houses of Parliament and a separate image of Big Ben were both classified simply as "towers" -- which many Englishmen may find disparaging.

However, you would expect it to be able to recognise a mountain range, even if it struggled with its particular name. But a snap of North Wales' Snowdonia came out as a "vertebrate". It wasn't the oddest one: the London Eye was listed as a common, and the Angel of the North was simply referred to as a "device".