Google's Unsupervised Self-Learning Neural Network Searches For Cat Pics

From DailyTech: Magic happens at Google Inc.'s (GOOG) X Laboratory, a secret research and development center located at an unknown location in the Bay Area of Northern California. Some projects previously disclosed have been the augmented reality "Google Goggles" and the self-driving automobiles. Google X is even rumored to be working on a space elevator.

But one of the most fascinating -- and perhaps frightening -- Google X accomplishment has been its creation of one of the world's largest self-learning "unsupervised" neural networks. Consisting of 16,000 computer processors, the array is capable of complex task that are considered impossible using traditional algorithms. One such task is finding cute cats on the internet.

As a test of the nascent cognizant system, Stanford University Electrical Engineering Professor Andrew Y. Ng and Google fellow Jeff Dean fed the machine 10 million thumbnails of YouTube videos. Without being told exactly what to "look for", the network began to hierarchically arrange data, removing duplicate similar features and group certain images together.

One example was the cat. Thanks to the wealth of cat videos on YouTube, the cyber-brain eventually came to a single dream-like image representing the network's knowledge of what a cat looks like. The network was able to then able to recognize its favorite thing -- cat videos, no matter what subtle variations merry YouTubers come up with to their feline's appearance.

The significant part, say researchers, is that the network wasn't told what to look for.

Professor Dean comments in an interview in The New York Times, "We never told it during the training, ‘This is a cat.' It basically invented the concept of a cat. We probably have other ones that are side views of cats."

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