That's some industrial grade apophenia, pareidolia, and good old fashioned cognitive dissonance. The MSSS imagery makes it very plane that the Cydonian face is just a hill. But no, they put some white arrows pointing to nothing and claim it's evidence of a made up thing.
I'd be really interested in generating on the fly numerical apophenia like those. In fact I dabbled into doing exactly that using GPT to code a python script. I ran L-BFGS-B on a unit pyramid to optimize its basic dimensions (height, base-length, set to 1 initially) so that it matches the pyramid equations [1]. As a result I get the pyramid's actual dimensions. My synthetic pyramid is slightly better than the actual pyramid when it comes to matching the "pyramid equations". I know this is tautological, yet when I observe the actual pyramid dimensions and where it fits on the gradient magnitude graph my script[2] provides, it falls right when the gradient becomes almost flat. That made me want to explore further, and I attempted to come up with my own crackpot equations using symbolic regression/genetic programming[3]. The ultimate goal: a VR app, let's call it the "conspiracy lens".
Seems like the de Saussure family still has a very robust scientific tradition. The most famous of the de Saussure, Ferdinand, founder of synchronic linguistics, got trapped into an apophenia trap with his theory of "hypograms" underlying saturnian verses. More at https://www.degruyter.com/document/doi/10.1515/sem-2016-0158...
