If anyone wants to send this to their non-dev friends, here's the write-up I sent to mine!<p><a href="https://medium.com/@stripenight/seeing-how-computers-might-think-e8ea3d1de081" rel="nofollow">https://medium.com/@stripenight/seeing-how-computers-might-t...</a><p>---<p>tldr: To figure out how computers "think", Google asked one of its artificial intelligence algorithms to look at clouds and draw the things it saw!<p>There's this complex Artificial Intelligence algorithm called a neural network ( <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Artificial_neural_network" rel="nofollow">https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Artificial_neural_network</a> ). It's essentially code which tries to simulate the neurons in a brain.<p>Over the last few years, there have been some really cool results, like using neural networks to read people's handwriting, or to figure what objects are in a picture.<p>To start your neural network, you give it a bunch of pictures of dogs, and tell it that those pictures contain dogs. Then you give it pictures of airplanes, and say those are airplanes, etc. Like a child learning for the first time, the neural network updates its neurons to recognize what makes up a dog or an airplane.<p>Afterwords, you can give it a picture and ask if the pic contains a dog or an airplane.<p>The problem is that WE DON'T NOW HOW IT KNOWS! It could be using the shape of a dog, or the color, or the distance between it's legs. We don't know! We just can't see what the neurons are doing. Like a brain, we don't quite know how it recognize things.<p>Google had a big neural network to figure out what's in an image, and they wanted to know what it did. So, they gave the neural net a picture, but stopped the neural net at different points, before it could finish deciding. When, they stopped it, they asked it to "enhance" what is just recognized. Eg. if it just saw the outline of a dog, the net would return the picture with the outline a bit thicker. Or, if it saw the colors similar to a banana, it would return the picture with those colors looking more like a banana's colors.<p>This seems like a simple idea, but it's actually really complex, and really insightful! Amazing images here - <a href="https://photos.google.com/share/AF1QipPX0SCl7OzWilt9LnuQliattX4OUCj_8EP65_cTVnBmS1jnYgsGQAieQUc1VQWdgQ?key=aVBxWjhwSzg2RjJWLWRuVFBBZEN1d205bUdEMnhB" rel="nofollow">https://photos.google.com/share/AF1QipPX0SCl7OzWilt9LnuQliat...</a><p>Original article - <a href="http://googleresearch.blogspot.com/2015/06/inceptionism-going-deeper-into-neural.html" rel="nofollow">http://googleresearch.blogspot.com/2015/06/inceptionism-goin...</a>