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kottke.org posts about Ville-Matias Heikkila

A neural network tries to identify objects in Star Trek:TNG intro

Ville-Matias Heikkilä pointed a neural network at the opening title sequence for Star Trek: The Next Generation to see how many objects it could identify.

But the system hadn’t seen much space imagery before,1 so it didn’t do such a great job. For the red ringed planet, it guessed “HAIR SLIDE, CHOCOLATE SAUCE, WAFFLE IRON” and the Enterprise was initially “COMBINATION LOCK, ODOMETER, MAGNETIC COMPASS” before it finally made a halfway decent guess with “SUBMARINE, AIRCRAFT CARRIER, OCEAN LINER”. (via prosthetic knowledge)

  1. If you’re curious, here is some information on the training set used.