> To build the dataset, we keep only sketches that have been recognized by the neural network in the QuickDraw game. To prevent imbalance from overly represented countries (e.g., the US), we down-sample the data by focusing on the 100 most prominent countries and capping the number of drawings per category–country pair at 10,000. [p19]
The phone cluster was especially amusing to see in the context of visiting a small history museum in Ohio earlier today with my kids (12 years old) and explaining to them about how a rotary dial phone worked.
(The added bonus comes from watching Monsters and Minions with them yesterday and during a scene where the director is informed that they ran out of film, my daughter turned to me and asked, “What’s film?”)
Sometimes this is exaggerated. How do people view slide rules, telegraphs, and gramophones, or other historical artifacts from a further generation ago? They aren't that strange, and neither should rotary phone or film be to the current generation.
The most striking real world example of something similar has always been the different ways different cultures count/show numbers on a single hand (Ask a friend to show the number 3 on a hand). As far as concepts - it’s a difference in how we perceive the “starting point” of a hand.
There's a story in Rhodes' book on the atom bomb of Otto Frisch & Liese Mettner discussing the ideation of nuclear fission analogised to cell fission, drawn as a dumbbell viewed head on with the neck of the split a circle inside the bigger cell circle:, where we classically see two cells splitting side by side with a channel between them: she meant exactly the same thing viewed 90° rotated.
https://github.com/googlecreativelab/quickdraw-dataset
(The added bonus comes from watching Monsters and Minions with them yesterday and during a scene where the director is informed that they ran out of film, my daughter turned to me and asked, “What’s film?”)