
Quick, Draw - madmax108
https://quickdraw.withgoogle.com/
======
sthlm
This is the best "visualization" / "explanation" of the possibilities and
limits of AI that I've seen.

I can show this to someone and say:

1\. The software can recognize a feather, as long as it looks similar to what
it thinks a feather looks like.

2\. The software can't recognize a feather if it's never seen a feather like
that. It's not a sentient being.

This is good, because most examples focus on point #1 and -- if enough
marketing is involved -- don't go enough into point #2.

People read news articles like "X can recognize cats in a picture with Y
certainty!" and are quick to assume that this "AI" can make sense of a picture
and understand it, when all it does is apply certain methods for a certain use
case.

This does a much better job by letting people write (or draw) their own test
cases and figure out the limits intuitively.

~~~
jawns
> 1\. The software can recognize a feather, as long as it looks similar to
> what it thinks a feather looks like.

I was prompted to draw a hurricane. I drew something that looked like the
typical hurricane doodle used on news reports.

The software didn't recognize it.

When the game was over and I was able to look at all of the doodles that were
used to train the software to recognize a hurricane ... the majority of them
instead looked like tornadoes!

So maybe we should more precisely say:

1\. The software can recognize a feather, as long as it looks similar to what
the humans who contributed its training set think a feather looks like.

~~~
StephenConnell
I was asked to draw: brush I drew a hair brush. It was trained to see brush as
a bunch of circles or trees.

~~~
Hondor
Are you sure that wasn't "bush"?

------
franciscop
Just reminding Google that snakes can eat elephants so please stop confusing
them with hats:

[http://imgur.com/lBtGUKr](http://imgur.com/lBtGUKr)

~~~
ghgr
Adult neural networks cannot understand that.

~~~
wiz21c
I don't know how it sounds exactly for a native English speaker, but saying
"adult neural networks" seems to give the intelligence trait to some piece of
software.

Times are changing...

~~~
macobo
You're missing a cultural reference. [http://www.thelittleprince.com/work/the-
story/](http://www.thelittleprince.com/work/the-story/)

~~~
dmix
Chapter 1 of The Little Prince from Wikipedia:

> The narrator explains that, as a young boy, he once drew a picture of a boa
> constrictor digesting an elephant in its stomach; however, every adult who
> saw the picture would mistakenly interpret it as a drawing of a hat.
> Whenever the narrator would try to correct this confusion, he was ultimately
> advised to set aside drawing and take up a more practical or mature hobby.
> The narrator laments the crass materialism of contemporary society and the
> lack of creative understanding displayed by adults. As noted by the
> narrator, he could have had a great career as a painter, but this
> opportunity was crushed by the misunderstanding of the adults.

------
daveheq
It seems the answers are pre-programmed because I drew just a car and it said
"I know! It's a police car" even though I'd drawn no siren.

Also with the sweater drawing I'd drawn just a T-shirt accidentally then when
drawing a long sleeve it said it knew it was a sweater when it could have been
similar things.

So this demonstration isn't about it identifying the drawing correctly, it's
just about saying when it's found something considered close enough in an
overly-broad range of ambiguous things based on the answer it's been given
already.

It did identify some partially drawn things, like a line or a circle or more
complex things the partial drawing could have been, but the pre-loaded rigging
made me stop the test.

~~~
rtkwe
It's because it's gathering training data from the things other people are
drawing. So if it's just asking for police cars anything car like should just
fall into the police car category.

~~~
mikeash
It also stops you once it correctly identifies the drawing, even if you're far
from done. If it incorporates that into its training, then it'll presumably
learn to figure out what you meant earlier and earlier.

It's interesting to consider whether it would end up making guesses that it
sometimes gets correct, or whether it would actually learn to discriminate
based on very early stages of drawing. It's conceivable to me that people
might start out drawing "police car" differently from "car" in some subtle but
detectable way, even if it doesn't involve what we humans would consider to be
the distinguishing features of a police car.

------
Munksgaard
It couldn't guess my aircraft carrier. The reason: Other people draw aircrafts
instead.

[http://imgur.com/a/xtdYE](http://imgur.com/a/xtdYE)

For reference, here's my carrier

[http://imgur.com/a/DL7js](http://imgur.com/a/DL7js)

~~~
eterm
People really can't draw hospitals either. Not one of them looks like a real
hospital (because what does a hospital look like. You know one if you see one
but it's the people not the buildings).

The drawings at best look like churches (a building with a cross on top), but
most just have giant crosses on the side.

~~~
Kluny
Disagree - I recognize hospitals by the brutalist architecture and the huge
ventilation pipes.

[http://www.viewroyal.ca/assets/Discover~View~Royal/Photo~Gal...](http://www.viewroyal.ca/assets/Discover~View~Royal/Photo~Galleries/Scenes~Around~Town/Victoria%20General.jpg)

I guess if I was trying to doodle one, I'd do something like this:
[http://med-fom-emerg.sites.olt.ubc.ca/files/2012/06/surrey.j...](http://med-
fom-emerg.sites.olt.ubc.ca/files/2012/06/surrey.jpg)

A carport with ambulances parked in front.

------
anupshinde
For first few minutes, I was testing this neural net. After 10 minutes, this
starts influencing me on what I should be drawing.

After sometime I start scribbling randomly. Then it says "I see motorbike".
And, wow! that was a motorbike. I din't see a motorbike in the drawing until
it told me what it resembled. I didn't freak out, but closed the window
immediately and told myself - "its a machine, I'm a programmer, I know how NNs
work and there's nothing to worry about". The kind of feeling non-techies have
when they experience predictive-text for the first time and they they say "it
knows what I am thinking"

~~~
mason55
[http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/v436/n7047/full/436150a...](http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/v436/n7047/full/436150a.html)

------
roryisok
I got suspicious when it asked me to draw camouflage. Nope. Not going to help
train the neutral net that will be used to find me when the singularity comes

~~~
robert_tweed
And by drawing nothing, you've provided it with the best possible drawing of
camouflage.

~~~
roryisok
well actually I drew a smiley face and the word "nope" beside it

~~~
kevincox
Beside what?

~~~
lucb1e
Beside the smiley face?

------
shmageggy
It does a nice job with invariance to scaling and translation (probably
normalized in preprocessing) but it's definitely not invariant to rotation :)

[http://imgur.com/a/UeXi1](http://imgur.com/a/UeXi1)

~~~
long
Which is understandable. Certain image categories aren't rotation invariant.
Turn the letter M upside down and you get W.

~~~
shmageggy
I agree that some classes (like M) should exhibit only limited invariance, but
the examples here are clearly rotation invariant to us since we can readily
recognize them.

------
hailpixel
The network guessed some of the "correct" answers far to quickly. For example,
with just an L shape (|_) it guessed suitcase. Feels like the model is
suffering from overfitting.

Fun though.

~~~
pan69
The premise seems to be a little odd, i.e. I tell you what to draw and then I
guess what it is.

I guess it would have been more of an A.I. challenge if the premise was; draw
anything and I'll try to guess what it is.

~~~
gcp
It's weird but the computer can choose not to cheat and forget the answer when
guessing. Not possible for humans.

~~~
csydas
It's possible, but I'm not entirely convinced that this is honest, or at least
not really accurate. It's far too eager to try to match it to something than
it is to figure out what it has.

It could figure out most of my drawings but it would get them well in advance
of me completing anything substantial (like others, I would be asked to draw a
leg and draw just a curved line and it would guess leg before I finished).

Trying to draw what it asked for but with some unusual features (like lines or
dot patterns around what it asked for before drawing it) and it gets extremely
confused; it doesn't really seem to be good at filtering out any noise:
[http://imgur.com/a/oE1j2](http://imgur.com/a/oE1j2) (gallery of results and
what it thought it saw.

Drawing things it didn't ask for just to see what it was guessing resulted in
some really strange responses and fits. The answer set it has is extremely
limited, so something like a hand giving the horns (\m/) was last guess a
duck. A moose was a scorpion, then a duck, then a hand. Godzilla (or a bipedal
dinosaur if you prefer) was a vase, then a scorpion, then a boat. My loaf of
bread was a washing machine, an anvil, then a postcard. The Deathstar was a
bandage, a helicopter, and a lighthouse. And a chainsaw was considered an
aircraft.

Between the disruptive patterns and drawing things outside of it's vocabulary,
the system seems really confused. Looking at the comparison results, I can see
how when drawing some things it got it real fast. (Tennis Rackets were mostly
defined by a crosshatch pattern, Harps by a series of parallel vertical
lines). This makes sense. For other things, not as much.

It might be a more convincing presentation to give the user a list of items
the machine knows (the full list) and tell the user to try to draw some, and
then the computer could check it off as it gets them. That seems like a better
way of presenting this than "Draw a box. hey! you drew a box! Isn't that
cool?"

~~~
tragomaskhalos
I thought your "frying pan" was Roobarb out of Roobarb and Custard
([http://comicvine.gamespot.com/roobarb/4005-86519/](http://comicvine.gamespot.com/roobarb/4005-86519/)).
How impressed would I have been if the 'net had guessed that ?!

~~~
csydas
Huh, I had no clue what you meant until I looked at the picture then back at
my scribbles and saw the accidental drawing of the face I made.

To me this is another interesting distinction on the NN recognition versus a
human recognition - QuickDraw having a limited "vocabulary" to refer to really
highlights this, as does my own lack of knowledge of Roobarb. Some of these
things can really blindside us, and I suspect that it's going to require a lot
of human hand-holding for awhile for the machines to get a strong vocabulary.

For some time I've been pondering how far you could take a machine's tabula
rasa learning, for something like language, and how closely it would mimic a
child's learning. (Language, color, math, etc).

------
peeters
What's the reason for stopping you drawing as soon as it guesses it? I mean,
it's great you guessed "swing set" from me making a basic a-frame, but
wouldn't it give you more data if you let me actually draw the swings?

~~~
cooper12
Yeah it does feel abrupt. My guess is that Google only cares about getting the
minimal representation needed to guess at the object, even it's incomplete or
missing details.

------
oliv__
This is really fun.

As a designer/amateur artist, the most interesting part about this to me was
seeing other people's drawings/most-basic-concepts-of-a- _thing_ drawn out:
which lines they draw, which ones they don't, how they express an idea in the
most essential way, basically. (the 20s really helps)

It's a great window into how people think about things.

 _As a reference: I couldn 't understand why it didn't recognize my keyboard
([http://imgur.com/fXk6Gg9](http://imgur.com/fXk6Gg9)) but then it hit me hard
when I saw other people's drawings
([http://imgur.com/J7Lqodw](http://imgur.com/J7Lqodw))._

~~~
vidarh
Caveat: I noticed I quickly started adjusting my drawings to exaggerate the
most stereotypical features, and resort to stereotypes overall, because they
seemed more likely to get recognised.

So it is not just how people think about things, but at least in part also
_how people think other people will have thought about things_ guided by
seeing the examples of other drawings.

~~~
oliv__
Well, true, but I'm not sure anyone outside the HN crowd would try to _hack_
it that way.

------
NTripleOne
I drew this... not sure if I should feel disappointed that nobody's done it
before, or smug that nobody's done it before.

[http://i.imgur.com/KihrZQD.png](http://i.imgur.com/KihrZQD.png)

I am sorry, my Vs are not very consummate.

------
blauditore
I can see this soon to be overrun by people trying to mislead it, like what
happened to Microsoft's "Tay" on Twitter. Suddenly, ships will be penises and
bananas will be Hitler.

~~~
Razengan
I guess this highlights the flaws inherent in all intelligent systems based on
teaching. Misinformation fed to them at an early stage can screw them up
pretty much permanently.

We've been seeing that since forever with human children raised on doctrines
etc. that have no basis in reality.

~~~
michaelmcmillan
Could they not easily avoid this by using their Google Search images database?
They already have a filter for "drawings". Combining that with the title of
picture/alt attribute, you could pretty much avoid that scenario.

~~~
wongarsu
Isn't training neural nets for image recognition using Google's image
databases (right now Google Street View) the main purpose of reCAPTCHA?

------
koyote
Very cool!

Although I am a bit disappointed by the fact that it did not recognise my
amazing whale :(
[https://i.imgur.com/K5unmKS.jpg](https://i.imgur.com/K5unmKS.jpg)

Especially if you compare it to what it thought a whale should look like:
[https://i.imgur.com/Dxh1F3c.jpg](https://i.imgur.com/Dxh1F3c.jpg)

I guess this is like everything in AI: bad data in, bad data out.

~~~
drusepth
Yeah, I can't get enough of this. Also, having a touchscreen laptop makes it
extra fun.

That said, I'm a bit disappointed that it has a lot of trouble recognizing
anything outside of "how people normally draw things" (especially if you go
out of your way to do more than "the bare minimum", draw things at a different
angle, in 3D, etc).

[1] Umbrella (wheel, binoculars, pizza):
[http://i.imgur.com/jr9mexS.png](http://i.imgur.com/jr9mexS.png)

[2] Fork (sword, paintbrush, baseball bat):
[http://i.imgur.com/3uLIPkH.png](http://i.imgur.com/3uLIPkH.png)

[3] Envelope (phone, eraser, leaf):
[http://i.imgur.com/pemgKpD.png](http://i.imgur.com/pemgKpD.png)

------
filoeleven
This creeped me out a little when I first started playing it, not because of
its accuracy or anything but because of what it asked me to draw.

There were lots of innocuous things like [house, teapot, dog, zebra,
moustache] but there was also a substantial amount of things like [rifle,
aircraft carrier, submarine] that are military-related. I sort of got the
feeling that I was helping to train an AI that would later be deployed in
combat. I played another ten rounds or so to see what else might come up, and
aside from one or two repeats nothing did and I realized I was being silly.

~~~
themodelplumber
[marshmallow, hotel, ectoplasm]

omg, I just trained this thing to bust some ghosts

------
stirner
As someone who is woefully uninformed about ML and CV: in a case like this, is
the computer simply given the bitmap/vector graphic and left to learn how to
interpret the data as lines and shapes? Or is there some preprocessing done to
transform the data into something more "ML-friendly"?

~~~
malux85
In Deep Learning, you can feed the raw pixels into the network and it will
interpret the data as lines and shapes ..

The only preprocessing done is likely size reduction - the QuickDraw canvas is
quite high resolution, so it's probably scaled down with (just linear
interpolation)

~~~
stirner
Thanks. Come to think of it, I remember seeing a series of deep learning
examples that were trained on raw data and were able to create well-formed
TeX, XML, and other formats, so it makes sense that the same principle would
apply to image data.

------
regecks
It seems like you can draw garbage (e.g. faces/text/swastikas) on the picture
in the moments after it correctly identifies the object and before it starts
the next object, and it seems to "save" it (though I am not sure if it is
persisting it in their training data).

------
thom
Well, if there's one thing this has taught me, it's that the trackpad on my
ThinkPad is absolutely terrible.

~~~
cooper12
It taught me that everyone is a better artist than me. As a consolation, I'm
using a Macbook Pro touchpad, touted as the best and even it can't compensate
for my lack of artistic skill. Not sure if it would be easier with a mouse or
not. It'd be really fun to see a post-mortem done where maybe we could see if
any artists used their drawing tablets as well as error rates across different
devices like tablets.

------
oneeyedpigeon
The tricky bit with this task is context. For example, my 'spider' sucked big
time, and I started trying to draw a web right at the end (before running out
of time). This is exactly how I would play 'Pictionary', with plenty of big
arrows pointing to the part of the drawing representing the word. However,
that really isn't appropriate when trying to train a neural net to recognise
abstract images.

Similar complexities arise in relation to perspective (should 'bridge' be
side-on or top-down?) and even something as obvious as homonyms (I drew 'nail'
as the small metal thing you use to hang a picture, but I'm sure others would
have drawn the thing at the end of a finger).

I guess my point is that this comes across very much as a game (maybe that's
all it really is), which will probably give poor 'neural net training'
results, as opposed to if it weren't a game - e.g. by increasingly the
ridiculously short time limit. I'm sure the results will still be interesting,
but I think they'll end up very abstract rather than very accurate - maybe
we'll just 'invent' a new set of logograms.

~~~
wongarsu
>However, that really isn't appropriate when trying to train a neural net to
recognise abstract images.

Or is it? Beyond the most simple shapes, humans heavily rely on context for
image recognition. Maybe a neural net should do the same to be successful.

------
SquareWheel
Well this is surprisingly fun. I just worry I'm making a mess of the machine
learning with my terrible doodles.

------
eterm
Disable privacy badger. Without it the app "works" but says it can't guess
anything.

When it couldn't even guess my envelope I was suspicious and disabled pb. Then
found out it "live" guesses as you go!

~~~
realsneil
Thank you for this, it got 0/6 the first time for me, and I'm literally
DaVinci on the doodles...

------
komali2
This was embarrassing. I'm a terrible artist, I mean, well and truly
_incapable_ of drawing, and I think the questions become "easier" to draw the
more she gets wrong. So I struggled to convey cello, then church, and finally
"circle." Which she almost didn't get.

~~~
vanderZwan
OTOH, you have a great career in Q&A ahead of you!

------
picardo
It's a neat demo, but it would be a lot neater if it recognized something that
I chose to draw rather than something I am told to draw.

~~~
cm2187
Agree. And the 20sec timer is annoying. I guess it has been introduced to keep
the load on their server down.

~~~
the_af
I'm pretty sure the 20 second timer is meant to keep you focused on the
essentials of what you're trying to draw. Makes sense to me.

------
Dowwie
Is google using the drawings from the game to train the AI further? I assume
so.

~~~
gregorkas
Yes, they state it on the website as well: "See how well it does with your
drawings and help teach it, just by playing."

~~~
x1798DE
This is interesting, because once it recognizes my drawing, it cuts me off
before I finish, which would seem like it's adding incomplete drawings to the
training set. Maybe it just wants examples of versions that it can't already
recognize.

~~~
xigency
Yea, apparently two disconnected spoked-wheels are a bicycle now, based on the
drawing it accepted from me.

------
zydeco
this is nothing like Apple QuickDraw

~~~
jonstewart
Kids these days, probably don't even realize the reference to Quick Draw
McGraw.

------
mikejedw
Fun hack to play along with humans:

* In Chrome, open the developer tools, and find the style for "#challengeword-text" (you can hover over the challenge word, hit right-click and then "inspect" to get there).

* Set that style to opacity: 0 or something similar. (Be sure it's the #challengeword-text style and not just the element.style)

* Then, in your console, type "Array.prototype.slice.call(document.getElementById('challengetext-word').getElementsByTagName('span')).map((v)=> v.textContent).join('')". You should see the clue word appear after that.

* On two screens, show the browser window with the game to other humans, and keep the console on a screen only visible to you.

* Keep repeating that JS command in the console to get the word every time the challenge word screen appears (you can just hit up and enter, if you've already typed it.)

* And... bam! Now you can do a human vs computer round.

------
craftandhustle
I, for one, am really excited that Google has approached these "experiments"
in the manner it has. I'm a designer with a keen eye on new media; so by no
means a programmer/developer. For me, it has made machine learning a lot more
accessible. Up to this point, I hadn't figured out how to "play" with this
technology and now I can.

For Quick, Draw specifically, I'm interested in a "search" functionality where
I can input a term such as "computer" and see not only the average
representation, but more importantly, the fringe.

The possibilities for creative brainstorming are tremendous.

------
anonova
One it gave me was "camouflage". I have no idea how to represent that with a
simple line drawing.

~~~
blauditore
I guess the best bet would have been drawing some piece of clothing with the
most commonly used camo pattern, sth like:
[https://www.google.ch/search?q=camouflage+pattern](https://www.google.ch/search?q=camouflage+pattern)

------
speeder
For me it failed hard... chrome (the browser I use) kept freezing with 100%
CPU use :/

The single time it worked without freezing it nailed correctly what I drew
though :)

EDIT: tried again

performance still bad... but I saw one interesting, it requested me to draw a
Knee, and... failed to recognize it.

Except after it ended and I went to see other people drawings, mine was
identical, but flipped! I guess because I am left-handed or something like
that...

Still, it is funny that it failed hard to recognize a flipped drawing.

As for the explanation: everyone drew a leg, seen from the side, slightly bent
(me included). But I drew like this ">" while everyone else drew like this "<"

EDIT 2: someone asked me why it is not in portuguese :(

also I saw the reply below, I am on a Chrome on OSX right now.

~~~
spuz
I noticed the same thing with regards to orientation. I drew a hammer in a way
no human could possible not guess what it was supposed to be but the AI didn't
see it. The examples of other people's drawings had hammers all aligned
vertically, whereas mine was aligned horizontally. I guess orientation matters
to the AI.

~~~
Declanomous
I drew bread as a loaf from an isometric perspective. It didn't get it. All
but one of the other pictures were of a single slice of bread. There was
another picture of a loaf of bread, but it was mirrored in relation to mine.
Seems like some bit of knowledge should be devoted to whether orientation is
important, but the computer doesn't understand that. It seems like this is
because most people draw pictures one way initially. It might be helpful to
have each person draw a second picture of the same thing.

------
dzink
Looking at a closest line match doesn't seem to work well, simply by factor of
positioning of the drawings. I suspect they need to rotate the recognition
objects around their axis, but even then, you're drawing 3d objects and using
2d recognition to detect them. (an airplane looks differently from its side
than from its front). I drew a very clear to see pencil horizontally and it
matched it to two horizontally drawn airplanes - one of which was supposed to
be an aircraft carrier by the description. The existing pencils in its memory
were positioned vertically when drawn, so no chance it would match them.

------
oneeyedpigeon
"Draw Animal Migration in 20 seconds"

And I'm done.

------
Dinius
Couldn't recognize anything I drew with keyboard mouse control. Then again,
neither can I.

[http://i.imgur.com/o3LJlPI.png](http://i.imgur.com/o3LJlPI.png)

~~~
cooper12
That diving board is pretty good for twenty seconds. Also with my limited
experience using keyboard control, acceleration can mess you up easily.

------
cs2818
Initially it couldn't get any of mine, but then I realized that Privacy Badger
was blocking something important, causing it to silently fail. After allowing
it through it got most of them.

~~~
gagege
That must be what happened to me too. I thought it was just stupid at first,
because all of my drawings looked like the examples given at the end.

------
wbillingsley
Of course it just takes one juvenile prankster to say in a crowded room "You
won't believe what it recognises phalluses, poo emoji, and bottoms as" and
it's going to be Microsoft Tay all over again.

So nobody do that, right.

Seriously, don't even think about it.

(More seriously, I think I might have been de-trainging it by trying to draw
the correct drawing using a touch-pad... rather too many of my phones seem to
look like tornados by the time the dang thing's got stuck in draw mode trying
to click-and-drag to draw)

------
yincrash
Apparently a phone and a telephone are two different things
[http://i.imgur.com/HujDN5W.jpg](http://i.imgur.com/HujDN5W.jpg)

~~~
0x0dea
Do you know what year it is?

------
markatkinson
Either Googles AI has very high drawing standards or I am a terrible artist.
It didn't guess ANY of my drawings, and they all looked very similar to the
other images :(

~~~
x1798DE
I had the same thing happen, turns out Privacy Badger blocks some important
component in the recognition, so switching to a private window fixes it.

------
trosi
> Draw the Mona Lisa in under 20 seconds

Seriously?

~~~
adamors
It's easy. [http://i.imgur.com/NXfxzSh.png](http://i.imgur.com/NXfxzSh.png)

------
andy_ppp
This game seems to essentially be win lose or draw the gameshow; the computer
is throwing out some random variations like contestants guessing. It makes it
easy for the computer to try 'car' the getting a no it tries 'police car'. I
wonder how many things it understands...

We are so far from general AI. It's so strange how our brains can refine
existance down so easily... how many CPUs is the human brain worth as far as
we know?

~~~
robbiep
it guessed phone when asked to draw phone but obviously wasn't strong enough a
match because it moved on without getting it right before coming back to it
twice. Finally stayed on blackberry after doing cellphone. Requires some
weighting to get there?

------
cooper12
This is fascinating at looking at how people create abstractions for things.
Also funny how sometimes people just give up and write words as that's the
best way to label whatever they were given to draw. Lastly I'm surprised at
how hard it was for me personally to imagine some of the things given even
though I would be able to recognize them in an instant, even from the drawings
here.

------
throwaway2016a
It got all of them for me except "Hexagon" which kind of baffled me. It's a
basic shape. (yes, I drew it with the right number of sides)

~~~
drdeca
Many of the images it showed for what it thought a hexagon is had the wrong
number of sides,when I did it.

It also didn't get my hexagon.

------
crphang
Really fun. The algorithm generates new nouns based on my drawing on the fly
and add to the original pool. It stops and say 'Oh I know, it is ___', when
there exist a guess that is the same as the answer. Might seem like it is
really clever, or, it could have like 1000 guesses for every stroke and one of
it is the correct answer.

My bathtub looks too ridiculous for it to be able to guess it with confidence.

------
KennyCason
It tends to never guess what I draw. :/

I'm not sure if it's because I'm left handed, but I tend to draw everything
backwards from all the examples that the bot has seen.

I also think that the other examples it's seen are horribly drawn in many
cases, making me think perhaps a 1 minute time frame would yield better
results. I can't draw anything meaningful in 20 seconds haha.

------
abhv
Researchers are trying to collect data for training. I wonder how many
examples they receive and how many are bogus.

The microsoft chat experiment from a few months ago shows that people can hack
these systems to train them into racist slur-spewers.

Similarly, i wonder how this project aims to get accuracy given that many
people are going to draw the porno objects no matter what the prompt was to
mess with it.

------
alexdumitru
I managed to guess Mona Lisa.

[http://i.imgur.com/HjUdIDA.png](http://i.imgur.com/HjUdIDA.png)

~~~
artursapek
How...

This must be using a relatively small corpus of terms to guess from.

~~~
alexdumitru
I have no idea. Here's another weird one:

[http://i.imgur.com/tESGAGz.png](http://i.imgur.com/tESGAGz.png)

------
MayeulC
It asked me to draw an helicopter, then a shovel, and guessed right in both
cases. But I noticed that the training dataset was of poor quality: "shovel"
drawings were full of helicopters.

I also noticed it was very laggy on my phone, making it hard to draw anything
before the end of the countdown.

------
cocochanel
My doodles are terrible data points but this was a lot of fun! Guessed a few
of them right, although a bit too fast :)

------
0xmohit
Doesn't even recognize a cup.

Amusingly, the one I had drawn looked pretty similar to one of the examples
drawn by other people.

~~~
brusch64
Cup didn't work for me too. I had the feeling that it's pretty good too.

------
nommm-nommm
It asked me to draw mug and guessed coffee cup. Then it asked me to draw
coffee cup and guessed mug. Frustrating.

------
spectaclepiece
I can tell you guys one thing, the training data most certainly didn't include
any pictures unsafe for work.

------
GoToRO
2 legs: I see mustache. 4 legs: I see sheep. 6 legs: I see spider. 8 legs: Oh,
I see. It's an ant!

------
rubyfan
One major annoyance with this. When I get done drawing, I have no idea if
something was detected or not. I can't tell if something is supposed to happen
or if it's meant to rush me to the next thing. I'm waiting for some feedback
or interaction after the drawing.

------
bartkappenburg
It reminds me of what google did to improve their search for images:
[https://crowdsource.google.com/imagelabeler/category](https://crowdsource.google.com/imagelabeler/category)

The things you draw here is new input for their model.

------
Grue3
Didn't recognize lollipop that I drew. It was pretty classic but not in
direction it expected (from bottom left to upper right). I added more lines,
confusing it even further. You'd think image recognition should work
independently of rotation.

------
erelde
It didn't recognize my phone drawing, but it was interesting to see other's
people drawings of phones, I drew what it called a cell phone. Some drawings
were smartphones, other were corded phone with a rotary dial and everything in
between.

------
neovive
This just reminded me how bad I am at Pictionary; I can't blame the AI for
more poor doodling skills.

It's interesting how the 20 second time limit forces you to focus on broad
shapes as opposed to details, which works well for pattern recognition.

------
afhammad
It says draw a leg, I draw a straight line and before i even finish drawing
the line it guesses "leg". Not rigged. And the "toe" I drew could have easily
been a finger or thumb but it seemed to be sure it was a toe.

~~~
koliber
Perhaps it was never trained to see fingers or thumbs. Perhaps it is trained
to recognize a couple dozen things. If it never heard of a finger or a thumb,
how could it have used it as a guess.

~~~
drdeca
I got "finger" as a prompt at least twice, so that's one of the things. It
didn't recognize the ones I drew though. It expects it to be flat and pointing
up with the nail, not bent.

Perhaps the toes are drawn facing down?

------
accurrent
It would be an interesting exercise to collect these doodles as a dataset and
publish them. It could give insight into what are the key identifying features
we look for as humans in relation to the world around us.

~~~
vanderZwan
They could also combine it with recaptcha to filter out the trolls.

------
agumonkey
Ha, this was my first college project, except it was first year OOP and we had
no clue about NN. Not even prolog (if I had known combinatorial exploration
was alright in some cases .. alas). Fun.

------
narutouzumaki
Funny side note, for some reason, even though the text is in English as it
should be it has a distinctly German/Swedish accent to it, really threw me off
while drawing haha.

------
welanes
Pff, couldn't even recognize bread:
[http://i.imgur.com/kSdiWeP.png](http://i.imgur.com/kSdiWeP.png)

------
ldev
Tried to draw a bear, got teddy-bear as an answer, failed. :/

------
kriro
"""Our neural net saw something else in all of your doodles. Select one to see
what it saw."""

The ones I remember: bed, apple, spreadsheet, rollercoaster :D

------
rw
This is pulling from a too-small data set.

I was able to get correct detections with too little data: In no world is a
circle with a bar coming out of it a "dumbbell".

------
anonymid
My attempt at "bread" [http://imgur.com/a/SMWm9](http://imgur.com/a/SMWm9)

~~~
Ygg2
WTF floor lamp?

------
namaemuta
I drew a pretty good approach of Charizard as a dragon and it didn't recognize
it (in my opinion way closer than the six best results).

Edit: wrong pokemon name.

------
cm2187
Is there any way to stop the timer? I don't want to be told what to draw, I
want to be able to free form without being interupted every 20sec.

------
anentropic
Either I can't draw or it doesn't work very well, or probably both

But I guess I just provided some more training data...

------
Mayzie
20 seconds is far too quick for me to draw anything more substantial than a
few simple geometric shapes with a computer mouse.

------
grandalf
This is really fun. It didn't get my calendar drawing, wondering if it would
have understood a box with a 31 in it.

------
nkozyra
Not sure what the training set is like, but it performs poorly on drawings
that are clipped at the edge of the screen.

------
petters
I was supposed to draw "phone," the computer guessed "telephone," but I still
failed. :-)

Pretty awesome still.

------
6stringmerc
Clever. Gave it a test run. Will play again when I get paid. Mostly because I
could do this for quite a while.

------
sac2tahoe
I see pride! I see power! I see a badass mother who don't take no crap off of
nobody!

------
delegate
It's been a while since I laughed so much.. My wife now laughs while doodling
in the other room :)

Impressive!

------
lalalandland
I found it somewhat hilarious with the tone of the voice guessing my mundane
sketches.

"Oh, I know, it's toe" :-(

LOL

------
anonymfus
It asks me to draw a bird, guesses "duck" and says sorry that it can not guess
it.

------
stillsut
Is there an API that does anything like this?

As in: Converts primitive doodles into a guess of what it is?

------
scandox
The best thing about this is drawing out one's most instinctive ideas about an
object.

~~~
myf01d
I drew a dick, and I was disappointed.

------
scelerat
Either I can't draw a bear or the AI can't recognize a bear. Probably both.

------
Cub3
Just want to point out sharing with twitter popup window is auto blocked by
chrome

------
cooperadymas
Strange.

Somehow this manages to bypass Chrome's "Mute Tab" and play audio anyway.

------
peeters
Nothing like being asked to draw "camouflage" in black and white.

------
wbillingsley
Ok, what foolish people made it think "pants" means trousers... :)

------
rkv
Whoever taught this thing what an asparagus is really screwed us all.

------
flamtap
Secretly, Google is just trying to make the best Pictionary player ever.

------
bitwize
It told me to draw "frog". I drew Kermit. It recognized it.

------
geocar
Is it learning from our drawings?

I just drew a bunch of dicks.

~~~
ksherlock
As did I, for science. One of them was [correctly] recognized as a wine
bottle. Note to self: never "Ok google, fetch me a bottle of wine."

------
repomies691
Quite lousy detection algorithm if you ask me.

[https://www.dropbox.com/s/zcjqwvxdpb455zu/quick_draw.jpg?dl=...](https://www.dropbox.com/s/zcjqwvxdpb455zu/quick_draw.jpg?dl=0)

------
andrewfong
I finally feel justified in getting a laptop with a pen.

------
ram_rar
This is by far the coolest thing, I have seen so far.

------
bambax
Immediately crashes the page on Chrome 54.0.2840.99 m...

~~~
dagw
works perfectly fine with my Chrome 54.0.2840.99 m (windows)

------
anoplus
Computers are going to so user friendly soon...

------
kevinherron
Wow, that was surprisingly fun. It got 6/6.

------
DanBC
"Draw donut"

"Oh I know. It's doubt".

------
grimmdude
I drew these for like 30 minutes straight.

------
smnplk
I see a hooker, or knife or fork...

------
lottin
1 out of 6, complete failure.

------
caleb111
that dud is a hacker

------
lanna
ladies and gentlemen, i present you the future of captcha

------
noja
Phew! Zero recognised.

We are safe.

------
k__
1\. sun

2\. animal migration

that escalated quickly...

------
caussatjerome
Good, Interesting !

------
Mayzie
As a non-American, I don't know what half of these objects are..

~~~
dagw
Which ones? The only one that felt 'American' to me was "school bus", but I've
watched enough American TV and film to know that that is a thing.

~~~
yitchelle
I got toilet, so I drew a hole in the ground. I guess I am not their target
market..

~~~
dagw
Their 'target market' is whoever uses the site. The program has no
preconceived notion of what a "toilet" is so if enough people draw a hole in
the ground for a toilet then it will start to recognize that as a toilet.

~~~
yitchelle
This could use this in the next election. It would be an interesting outcome!

------
softbuilder
So it tells you what to draw, then it tells you what you drew, and that is
useful and/or amazing?

~~~
PerfectElement
Who said it was supposed to be useful or amazing?

~~~
bnegreve
I think GP has raised a fair point. The landing page says: "Can a neural
network learn to _recognize_ doodles" but the game doesn't demonstrate that
the ANN is able to recognize arbitrary objects.

It merely shows that it's able to pick the correct name from a finite list of
possible names that could very well be small (e.g. 10 or 20 object names).

A better way to demonstrate that the ANN is truly able to recognize objects
with good accuracy would be to ask a person to draw an unspecified object and
guess its name.

If the goal is to acquire training data, they could still ask for a name in
case of failure.

~~~
bnegreve
BTW: this reminds me of detexify[1], the tool that can recognize latex symbols
from handwritten drawings. Same problem.

[1]
[http://detexify.kirelabs.org/classify.html](http://detexify.kirelabs.org/classify.html)

