The second assignment I’ve done this week, which can he found here, was to play the following game in which it asks you to draw 6 items and google will attempt to guess what they are.

You can see my results below, as I played the game a few more times than was necessary (because I found it very entertaining).

It’s given that I’m not an artist, especially with a laptop touchpad. I particularly enjoy my attempt at a goatee. You can also see my post about this assignment on Twitter too:

A fun assignment was to see how well google can recognize my drawings. I'm a terrible artist, but machine learning is brilliant! #ds106 #WebAssignments #WebAssignments2073 pic.twitter.com/842DUaBx4P

— Jessica (@JessicaDS106) September 5, 2018

I chose this particular assignment, after seeing another classmate, Emily, post about it here. When I saw it I knew it was one I needed to do, so be sure to check out her post on it! The main reason I was intrigued by this game is because I’m a Computer Science major and I’m very interested in machine learning; I’m actually taking a Data Mining class on machine learning this semester. It’s amazing how far we’ve come, that machines can actually learn to do things like recognize similar drawings, based on previous data. On this website, you can actually see what google interpreted your drawings as when it got them incorrect. For example with the sleeping bag I drew, the computer thought it was close to a pool, basketball, or a diving board.

I find this very fascinating, because, machine learning such as this is a part of our lives these days, with facial recognition, language translation, and even something as simple as an algorithm that recommends you songs they might like based on other customers who have similar music taste to you. Google even taught itself how to walk recently:

I think this kind of machine intelligence is important for the future, and this simple quickdraw game is a great example of that. Try it out for yourself! It’s as simple as going to the site and following the directions.