Forget keywords -- this new system lets you search with rudimentary sketches

Could the future of online shopping be as simple as sketching out what you're looking for and letting a computer figure out the rest? They've taught a deep learning neural network -- an incredibly powerful tool that mimics the way that the human brain works -- to recognize hand-drawn sketches and use them to search for real-life products. The network was "trained" to match sketches to photos based on a data set consisting of around 30,000 sketch-photo comparisons. From these it learned to interpret the way that people depict real objects in hand drawing. Most impressive of all is the fact that the sketches drawn by users don't even have to be all that detailed -- but the more detail users do add, the more accurate the search results become.