Google Teaches Computers to Draw Using Sketches Drawn by Humans

Google has a number of research projects underway aimed at making computers smarter and technically versatile. One of those projects involves teaching machines how to draw. On April 11, Google researchers released a technical paper describing "sketch-rnn", a neural network that has been trained by using thousands of crude human-drawn images to construct basic drawings of its own. One of the goals of the paper is to show that machines can be taught to draw certain things, like the sketch of a house, a tree or a dog, in a manner similar to humans. "As humans, we do not understand the world as a grid of pixels, but rather develop abstract concepts to represent what we see," wrote two of the papers authors, David Ha and Douglas Eck, who are researchers with Google Brain, the company's deep learning research group.