Scan your doodles to find the perfect matching photo online

A computer program can scan your sketches and search for a photograph that looks just like them. It's an exciting step towards a search engine based on drawings, says James Hays, a computer scientist at the Georgia Institute of Technology in Atlanta. "For some types of images you want to find, it would be very hard to express that thing with just language," he says. "What if you could just draw what you want?" In the past few years, artificial intelligence has become adept at recognising photos of cats or faces.