My first wife was very much into dogs. Soon after our first dog Lister (a beautiful fawn thai ridgeback male) had arrived from thailand, she wanted to visit a dog show with him. I was only moderately interested in this kind of activities: too many dogs and too many people for my taste. And I did not really like the idea of breeding and beauty contests for animals (I don‘t even like beauty contests for humans).
For a while I managed to convince my wife to go one of the following weekends (and not the next one). But of course, after a few weeks the inevitable happened: my wife had booked a hotel in Geneva, where a very important European dog show took place. And she wanted me to help her there.
When we arrived at the show, it was as predicted and feared: too many dogs and too many people. It was very loud, barking and screaming everywhere. I helped my wife to set up a small table and get organized. Then I had some time to just walk around and watch.
I walked from section to section. From the sheep dogs to the terriers to the chihuahuas to the St. Bernard dog. And I looked at the owners of all this dogs. It‘s a well known fact that dogs resemble their owners (in fact this is even scientifically proven). And therefore you find quite different people in the poodle section than in the American Staffordshire Terrier section. When I was thinking about this and looking from an elevated point over the whole show, it dawned on me:
I was looking on a detailed map of human personalities!
This was psychological data analyzed and visualized! There‘s a dog breed for every type of person (with the only exception of those few who hate dogs). Therefore the map represents almost the whole population. The breeds form clusters of people, with the winners of the show as centroids. Similar breeds / people were close on the map (show floor). More popular breeds (representing more frequent personalities) had larger sections.
As this map formation was most probably not intentional, it makes sense to call it a Self Organizing Map. And similar to Data Science SOM‘s (also called Kohonen Networks), the data manifold was approximated by a two dimensional surface.
In the first place it is a map of dog breeds. But thanks to the „isomorphism“ between human personality and dog breed it becomes a map of human personalities! The dogs somehow serve as three dimensional metaphoric glyphs which visualize the underlying high dimensional human personality data.
Now this was facinating! I was electrified. It was Teuvo Kohonen‘s furry dream.
I will not write about my specific discoveries at this show but leave it to you to make your own at a dog show near to you. Woof woof!
Images © author (not showing my first wife!)
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