It's possible, but I'm not entirely convinced that this is honest, or at least not really accurate. It's far too eager to try to match it to something than it is to figure out what it has.
It could figure out most of my drawings but it would get them well in advance of me completing anything substantial (like others, I would be asked to draw a leg and draw just a curved line and it would guess leg before I finished).
Trying to draw what it asked for but with some unusual features (like lines or dot patterns around what it asked for before drawing it) and it gets extremely confused; it doesn't really seem to be good at filtering out any noise: http://imgur.com/a/oE1j2 (gallery of results and what it thought it saw.
Drawing things it didn't ask for just to see what it was guessing resulted in some really strange responses and fits. The answer set it has is extremely limited, so something like a hand giving the horns (\m/) was last guess a duck. A moose was a scorpion, then a duck, then a hand. Godzilla (or a bipedal dinosaur if you prefer) was a vase, then a scorpion, then a boat. My loaf of bread was a washing machine, an anvil, then a postcard. The Deathstar was a bandage, a helicopter, and a lighthouse. And a chainsaw was considered an aircraft.
Between the disruptive patterns and drawing things outside of it's vocabulary, the system seems really confused. Looking at the comparison results, I can see how when drawing some things it got it real fast. (Tennis Rackets were mostly defined by a crosshatch pattern, Harps by a series of parallel vertical lines). This makes sense. For other things, not as much.
It might be a more convincing presentation to give the user a list of items the machine knows (the full list) and tell the user to try to draw some, and then the computer could check it off as it gets them. That seems like a better way of presenting this than "Draw a box. hey! you drew a box! Isn't that cool?"
Huh, I had no clue what you meant until I looked at the picture then back at my scribbles and saw the accidental drawing of the face I made.
To me this is another interesting distinction on the NN recognition versus a human recognition - QuickDraw having a limited "vocabulary" to refer to really highlights this, as does my own lack of knowledge of Roobarb. Some of these things can really blindside us, and I suspect that it's going to require a lot of human hand-holding for awhile for the machines to get a strong vocabulary.
For some time I've been pondering how far you could take a machine's tabula rasa learning, for something like language, and how closely it would mimic a child's learning. (Language, color, math, etc).
Yeah, but it's cheating itself. If it's telling me what it recognizes before I'm done, it severely reduces the usefulness of my input for further training. Anything submitted will just reinforce existing patterns, and do comparatively little to improve recognition.
