Google's Image Recognition Neural Network

First appearance: The Mysterious Nine Project

Google's Image Recognition Neural Network is a stage in The Mysterious Nine Project. It is a traveling staged based off Google's image recognition neural network and takes the players on a very trippy battle.

Description
What do machines dream of? New images released by Google give us one potential answer: hypnotic landscapes of buildings, fountains and bridges merging into one. The pictures, which veer from beautiful to terrifying, were created by the company’s image recognition neural network, which has been “taught” to identify features such as buildings, animals and objects in photographs. They were created by feeding a picture into the network, asking it to recognise a feature of it, and modify the picture to emphasise the feature it recognises. That modified picture is then fed back into the network, which is again tasked to recognise features and emphasise them, and so on. Eventually, the feedback loop modifies the picture beyond all recognition.

Imagination
Ultimately, the software can even run on an image which is nothing more than random noise, generating features that are entirely of its own imagination.



The pictures are stunning, but they’re more than just for show. Neural networks are a common feature of machine learning: rather than explicitly programme a computer so that it knows how to recognise an image, the company feeds it images and lets it piece together the key features itself.

But that can result in software that is rather opaque. It’s difficult to know what features the software is examining, and which it has overlooked. For instance, asking the network to discover dumbbells in a picture of random noise reveals it thinks that a dumbbell has to have a muscular arm gripping it:



The solution might be to feed it more images of dumbbells sitting on the ground, until it understands that the arm isn’t an intrinsic part of the dumbbell.

Sections of the Stage
In the Mysterious Nine Project, the stage takes players to the following sections.