(Xinhua Photo)

The question of age is often a tricky one - especially among women. Earlier this week, Microsoft invited people to try a website called How-Old.net, which guesses the user’s age and gender.

A new yellow colored box with age and a gender symbol have triggered an unexpected wave on social media in recent days. The page provided by Microsoft Website "how-old.net" lets users upload a picture and have the API predict the age and gender of any faces recognized in the picture - at least in theory.

The website was developed by two software engineers, Corom Thompson and Santosh Balasubramanian. As they put it in their blog, the two at first just wanted to showcase how developers can easily and quickly build intelligent applications using Azure services, a cloud computing platform of Microsoft.

The response to the new website was as huge as it was unexpected. Within hours, over 210,000 images had been submitted by users from all over the world. Users of the website just upload a photo, then the faces in the photo are analyzed by a program on the basis of 27 points including elements such as the pupil, the corner of the eye and the nose. Although it isn't particularly accurate, it's good for a laugh and users have been having fun with it.

Zhao Zhiwei works for iFLYTEK, one of the leading Chinese companies in facial recognition technology. He attributes the discrepancies on the Microsoft website to the different perspectives and lighting conditions when photos were taken. In addition, Zhao thinks the data used to determine the age and sex is insufficient.