"Intelligent software that brings rough sketches to life in a virtual world is promising to revolutionise the way children learn and to help engineers visualise their designs.... The MIT software monitors the image as it is being drawn on to a computer screen and allocates probabilities to various interpretations of what it might represent. As the user adds more detail, the software adjusts these weightings. To do this, it uses a technique known as Bayesian analysis, which is normally used to compute the likelihood of specific causes, given certain effects. 'With our software, the 'causes' are what the user had in mind to draw, and the 'effects' are what was actually drawn,' says Randall Davis, who has developed the code with Christine Alvarado at MIT's Artificial Intelligence Laboratory."

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