OT: Google Quickdraw

Just inaugurating my off-topic section with this post, that doesn’t talk about virtual reality or startup life. Today I just want to talk about my little experience with Google Quickdraw.

Google Quickdraw is like playing Draw Something (or Pictionary, for who, like me, spent some entertaining evenings playing with the board game), but against an Artificial Intelligence system… the one of Google… and you know how Google is smart with neural networks. (do you remember the success of DeepGo against the Go world champion? Well, Pepperidge Farm remembers)

The game is pretty simple: you are given 6 words, one at a time, and you have to draw it so that the AI will understand what you’re drawing.

You have only 20 seconds, but usually the system is so smart that it detects what you’re drawing in just some seconds! The impressive thing is that with some traits it sucessfully detects the thing you’re drawing, even if you’re not exactly painting like Van Gogh.

I think that Quickdraw has been a genius move by Google because it’s very funny to play it and then show your friends your terrible drawings with which the AI magically spotted the correct definition. This means that this program is having lots of shares on social networks and so from a marketing standpoint this is huge. Besides that, the high recognition rate shows how Google software is good, so from a technical standpoint you admire them. And I’m quite sure that all the drawings contribute in training of their artificial intelligence system, that maybe they’ll use to detect objects in Google Image. Well played Google, well played.

But, I’ve managed to break it. People really hated to team with me in Pictionary because they had no clue what I was drawing. And it seems that Google isn’t that different, since this is the answer it gave me while I was drawing some cute mountains:

And this is a collection of beautiful drawings made by me… what’s your opinion about them?

Ok, now stop reading this article and go drawing something here!