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<p>[QUOTE=&quot;Apocalypse Cow, post: 1375748, member: 24651&quot;]Not only is grading by machine inevitable it is possible today. All of the equipment necessary to do what is done by the eye of a human grader exists already and is being widely used in other industries. All that remains is for the technology to be adapted to coin grading.</p><p><br /></p><p>Exact surface topography can be scanned by a laser (which I believe secure plus does now). Luster can be measured by surface reflectivity. A mass spectrometer can determine composition (which I think the PCGS sniffer&nbsp; is doing now). Spectrophotometry can even measure the toning on a coin. </p><p><br /></p><p>The process will begin with a coin coming to a grader and within 5 or 10 minutes it will have moved&nbsp; through several machines and collection of quantitative data about that coin will exist that no human ever has come close to having. Now the machine will assign a grade and it will not have to think at all to do it. All it has to do is mindlessly mimic the decisions previously made by a large group of human graders. Imagine 100 graders grading 100,000 morgans and all of those coins go through the same comprehensive data collection. Now that the data set exists it is easy to take the human grade and see what quantifiable data is common to all graders for a given grade. From there it is a small step to creating a program that can predict how a human grader would evaluate a coin. You don&#039;t need to evaluate if it is wear or a weak strike, all that is needed is a large enough&nbsp; sample human graders who have done that in the past and the machine can compare and predict.</p><p><br /></p><p>If that process sounds unlikely it isn&#039;t. It is being done in astronomy now. See a web site called galaxy zoo which is using the general public to classify pictures of galaxies and is then using that data to train computers to do the same.</p><p><br /></p><p>At first machines will recommend a grade and a human will confirm it (the PCGS sniffer partially does this now). Then the machines will issue a grade and a human grader will be there to reject it. Finally a machine will be the only grader of a coin. Human graders will still be around for things like super rare coins for which a large enough data set does not yet exist and new issues and things like that but the bulk of submissions will be done completely by machine.</p><p><br /></p><p>Machine grading is not only coming but the transition process&nbsp; has already begun with the PCGS sniffer. A coin rejected by the sniffer comes back as what? Altered surfaces? That is a grade in itself and is being done by machine. It is only a matter of time until all facets of grading can be reproduced by machine. Someday you will see decimal grades and it wouldn&#039;t surprise me if grading went to several decimals.[/QUOTE]</p><p><br /></p>

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