Quick, Draw!

Have you ever wanted to play a fast game of Pictionary, but didn’t have friends? Thanks to Google, now there’s Quick, Draw!, an online game where you are prompted to draw something in 20 seconds. In each game, you get six prompts, which can be things like “pizza,” “foot”, “houseplant,”, “motorbike”, etc. It’s an addictive and fun way to join the AI bandwagon. Once you start drawing, the AI in the game takes over. It matches your drawing with thousands of drawings by others. If, within 20 seconds, you have drawn something that’s recognized (similar to those of thousands of others), your artwork has "passed".

Quick, Draw! uses a neural network to guess what you draw. When you play the game, you get an insight into how image recognition (a domain of AI) works. You draw, and a neural network tries to guess what you’re drawing. With every stroke of your mouse, a neural network tries to guess what you’re drawing, by recognizing patterns from previous drawings by users. Of course, it doesn’t always work. But the more you play with it, the more it learns. The technology used is similar to that of Google Translate, which can identify handwritten characters. The computer “looks” at a drawing and attempts to identify it.

The software doesn’t look just at what the player drew, but how they drew it, i.e., which strokes they made first and which direction they draw them in. The robot revolution is here and it’s artistic. It could need your help to understand the world around it. Visit https://quickdraw.withgoogle.com to find out for yourself.

When I played the game, one of the things I was asked to draw was "animal migration".  I was absolutely stumped. I wondered how I was to draw a herd of migrating wildebeest in 20 seconds. Needless to say, I failed utterly. Shown alongside, is the successful effort of another player.

"Quick, Draw!" is not the first AI experiment that Google has undertaken, but it's definitely one of the more fun projects. As you draw, the computer will guess out loud what it thinks you're drawing until it's sure: "Oh, I know, it's a duck!" Pretty cool, right? Somewhere behind the neural networks that we can't see in the back-end, the computer recalls all of the drawings that other people have submitted in the past and draws its conclusions based on that.

"Quick, Draw!" has become good at figuring out what you draw, even if though sketches will not be exactly what someone else has drawn. That is because lots of people have played it and the more people play, the better it gets. That's the magic of big data.

Need a more visual explanation? OK — let's say the game asks for a rabbit to be drawn. I draw a rabbit to the best of my ability, and the computer successfully guesses that I am, indeed, drawing a rabbit. You can see my (unfinished) rabbit.

Considering how bad my rabbit is, I'm impressed that the software could guess it right. I didn't get my bucket correct, even though my bucket is more bucket-like than my rabbit was rabbit-like. So, there must've been a disconnect between the strokes I made and what the computer expected.

When the game is over, the computer tells you what your drawing reminded it of. For instance, my rabbit drawing was similar to other people's drawings of a rhino and a duck. It's all about training the computer to compare and contrast different drawings and recognize that various features belong in different categories, or objects. While it may be easy for us to know what a duck looks like, the computer needs to "learn" that for itself. To make the computer understand, it needs to see several rabbit doodles before it starts to see the patterns that make a rabbit a rabbit.

Later, the game shows the rabbit drawings other people have submitted while playing the game. As you can see, most drawings of rabbits include big, floppy ears and a round body. So, while we may have encountered different mailboxes, and cookies, we have a similar idea of what each of those objects should look like. Again, the computer needs to see a lot of rabbit drawings before it can get good at guessing.

Of course, the technology isn't perfect and the algorithms behind "Quick, Draw!" don't always work the way they're supposed to. But as more and more people play the game, it's safe to assume that those algorithms will get smarter over time and improve its accuracy ratio. So, if you're a tech nerd or a fan of interactive games, give "Quick, Draw!" a whirl. Happy drawing!