Drawing a picture from memory using Human Level Artificial Intelligence

Note:  To make this website free to the public please click on an ad to support my sponsors or you can make a tax-deductable donation using Paypal (click on the donation icon on the left).

This video shows a robot drawing a picture from memory. There are no sound in the video because I wanted to show the viewers what the robot is thinking while making a drawing. The flashing text and freeze frames are the internal thoughts of the robot and not instruction text for the viewers. These internal thoughts describe the details of how the robot produce intelligence.

My robot doesn't use: planning programs/heuristic searches (used by MIT and Stanford University), Bayesian's probability theories for decision making, Bayesian's equation for induction and deduction, semantic networks for natural language understanding, predicate calculus, common sense systems, first-order logic, rule-based systems, genetic programming, or MACHINE LEARNING. By the way, you can't use current AI methods to build a robot that can draw a comic book. For example, the IBM Watson can't be used to draw comic books. Those researchers can spend 50 years programming instructions into the Watson, their code foundation disallows their robot to draw a comic book (or do complex human tasks).

The robot learns to draw pictures through a bootstrapping process. If the robot wants to be a comic book artist, he needs to learn art skills gradually. There are actually 3 videos made on this series. 1. Drawing a picture by copying. 2. Drawing a picture from memory. 3. Making a comic book page. Each video shows the gradual learning the robot must go through in order to become a comic book artist.

I want you to recall all the art skills that you learned from school, from Kindergarten to college. First, teachers teach students to draw by copying real life objects. The teacher would put an object, like a doll, on a table and asks the students to copy what they see. The teacher would tell students to look at shapes and edges and draw lines on paper to represent that object. Lessons about what to look at, where to look at, and what lines to draw on paper are facts the teacher teaches the students. Practicing drawing different objects is part of the learning process. Over the years, the students' brain uses personal likes/dislikes to develop their own style of drawing. Once the student can draw pictures by copying them, then he is ready for the next lesson.

The second lesson taught by teachers is to draw a picture based on an image from your mind. This lesson is very similar to the first lesson. Instead of copying an object from real life, the student is copying an image from memory. The student extracts an image of something he wants to draw. Next, he looks at this image in his mind and copies it.

The previous 2 lessons basically builds on itself to become more complex. The third lesson is to draw pictures based on storytelling. Learning the knowledge to become a comic book artist is a very complicated thing. First, the student has to know how to draw all objects, this includes: human anatomy, cities, landscapes, cars, highways, tables, animals, super heroes, faces, body parts, things, and places. The student has to have the ability to draw "all" objects and from "any" 360 degree angle. The student needs to have talent in his artwork, which means that his drawings have to appeal to a large group of people.

Next, the student has to have knowledge about movie directing. He has to have a movie playing in his head and the student decides which scenes to show on paper. The comic book artist usually works with a writer. The writer provides a one page script to the artist. The artist will read the script and design the page panels. In each panel, the artist has to decide what camera angle to use, what objects will be in each panel, where to put the captions and so forth. There are books written on how to make comicbooks and the rules are vast.

Drawing a comic book includes knowing knowledge about perspective, shading, composition, angle shots, realism, anatomy drawing, landscape drawing, environment object drawing, linear story telling, and so forth. As stated before, most knowledge for drawing is based on practice. Practicing more will mean better skills for the robot.

In the video, the robot is trying to select an image from memory to draw. He later decided not to extract an existing image from memory, but to fabricate a brand new image that isn't stored in memory. The robot's brain serves as an image processor and it can process images. For example, the robot's brain can take 2 or more images and combine them to form a brand new image. In this case, the robot needed an image of venom's costume and an image of a character pose. He planned to draw the character pose on the paper and superimpose venom's costume on the character pose. This scene shows the robot has the ability to fabricate images from its mind. If the robot doesn't have an image he is looking for in his brain, he uses his mind to fabricate a brand new image.