# Classification of the lunar surface pattern by AI architectures: Does AI see a rabbit in the Moon?

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2308.11107 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2308.11107/

## Key facts

- No citing papers in the map yet (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 11 of its 33 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 22 Aug 2023.

## Builds on (most cited first, 11 of 11)

- [Deep Residual Learning for Image Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1512.03385/) (2015)
- [Learning Transferable Visual Models From Natural Language Supervision](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.00020/) (2021)
- [An Image is Worth 16x16 Words: Transformers for Image Recognition at Scale](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2010.11929/) (2020)
- [A ConvNet for the 2020s](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2201.03545/) (2022)
- [Self-training with Noisy Student improves ImageNet classification](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1911.04252/) (2019)
- [Big Transfer (BiT): General Visual Representation Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1912.11370/) (2019)
- [Generic Attention-model Explainability for Interpreting Bi-Modal and Encoder-Decoder Transformers](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.15679/) (2021)
- [Billion-scale semi-supervised learning for image classification](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1905.00546/) (2019)
- [Partial success in closing the gap between human and machine vision](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2106.07411/) (2021)
- [What does a convolutional neural network recognize in the moon?](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1708.05636/) (2017)
- [Rabbit, toad, and the Moon: Can machine categorize them into one class?](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2203.16163/) (2022)

## Abstract (arXiv)

In Asian countries, there is a tradition that a rabbit, known as the Moon rabbit, lives on the Moon. Typically, two reasons are mentioned for the origin of this tradition. The first reason is that the color pattern of the lunar surface resembles the shape of a rabbit. The second reason is that both the Moon and rabbits are symbols of fertility, as the Moon appears and disappears (i.e., waxing and waning) cyclically and rabbits are known for their high fertility. Considering the latter reason, is the color pattern of the lunar surface not similar to a rabbit? Here, the similarity between rabbit and the lunar surface pattern was evaluated using seven AI architectures. In the test conducted with Contrastive Language-Image Pre-Training (CLIP), which can classify images based on given words, it was assumed that people frequently observe the Moon in the early evening. Under this condition, the lunar surface pattern was found to be more similar to a rabbit than a face in low-latitude regions, while it could also be classified as a face as the latitude increases. This result is consistent with that the oldest literatures about the Moon rabbit were written in India and that a tradition of seeing a human face in the Moon exists in Europe. In a 1000-class test using seven AI architectures, ConvNeXt and CLIP sometimes classified the lunar surface pattern as a rabbit with relatively high probabilities. Cultures are generated by our attitude to the environment. Both dynamic and static similarities may be essential to induce our imagination.