Automated Card Grading - Surface

[kevinlenane]

Ill try to answer some of the additional questions

1. Its most definitely a company (Genamint) and I will likely run and capitalize as a tech startup. Im starting with instant card evaluation and once i do that well id expand into other items (collectibles and alternative assets) that lend themselves to peer to peer selling. In the end we want to be the engine that impartially answers the question of condition instantly to better facliitate liquidity.

2. We are providing sub grades for front and back so 4 per front and 4 per back - 8 total per card. Centering, Edges, Corners and Surface. Id actually love to hear if anyone has any other requests or subdivisions (i think subdividing surface could be useful ie. print marks, creases, etc)

3.So on the question of how to treat centering. For now my plan was just to give folks the subgrades as data and then let them make the call on how much it matters. I had planned on giving equal weight to all factors which is just an average of the four grades from 1-10. I would be curious if people would prefer a more detailed unit of measure for things like centering since we could obviously just say its 45/55 and let you decide what you think that is. In my mind more information is better but that may only be for Net54 types. Opinions welcome here too.

4. On the many detailed surface questions - you are both on to something - itis definitely the most nuanced - its really about the training data and how we create the synthetic data here. All sorts of sub-grades underneath surface could be possible even on a set-basis but it just requires inputs to specify what is what. I suspect we'll evaluate surface in a generic way to start with the data building in what counts and what doesnt and in a v2 we'd label it. So most things that should dock a grade, will still dock and vice versa. You may just not get detailed information on it in early versions. There is some balance between scale and detailed info on the grading makeup. In short, these surface nuances WILL be accounted for - but they may not be called out in grading results. Again happy to hear opinions here.