Watch millions of people use Google's quirky sketch game in these addictive GIFs
Google introduced Quick, Draw! last November at our productivity's great expense. We spent hours in the office toying around with the image maker, resulting in some next-level sketches and a firm lecture from our bosses about "proper time management," whatever that means.
The tool wasn't just meant to help us waste time, though -- Quick, Draw! was actually a clever crowdsourcing effort from Google's A.I. Experiments team to train its neural network. As people played the game, the system learned how to identify exactly what they were sketching more accurately.
Google did us all a solid and released the data gathered from the program to give us all a look at how 15 million people have used Quick, Draw! since November. The cache has over 50 million drawings spread out over 345 different categories, so there's clearly been plenty of time spent doodling away online -- which is great for the AI, as we saw at the company's recent I/O developers conference. By releasing the dataset, Google hopes to give everyone a chance to use the crowdfunded sketches, especially developers trying to train neural networks of their own.
The data might be for aimed at developers -- but that doesn't mean we can't all enjoy it. With all the drawings released, the real fun is in scrolling through the endless rows of user-drawn sketches as they pop up in real-time.
Here's a few animal sketches in GIF form -- but you should totally check out the full set, too.
Nothing is better than the line. It might surprise you, but there more than just one way to drag your finger (or mouse) from point A to B.
If you're a developer, researcher, or anyone else with more than just a casual interest in the work, you can check out the full dataset on Github. That way, you can actually help make all of that time we wasted worthwhile.
Topics Artificial Intelligence Google
Brett Williams is a Tech Reporter at Mashable. He writes about tech news, trends and other tangentially related topics with a particular interest in wearables and exercise tech. Prior to Mashable, he wrote for Inked Magazine and Thrillist. Brett's work has also appeared on Fusion and AskMen, to name a few. You can follow Brett on Twitter @bdwilliams910.
