Digital ‘brain’ learned to spot cats by watching YouTube stills

Google is dabbling with getting computers to simulate the learning process of the human brain as one of the unusual projects for researchers in its X Lab.

Computers programmed with algorithms intended to mimic neural connections “learned” to recognise cats after being shown a sampling of YouTube videos, Google fellow Jeff Dean and visiting faculty Andrew Ng said in a blog post.

“Our hypothesis was that it would learn to recognise common objects in those videos,” the researchers said.