This machine translates written descriptions into images

Imagine an oak tree in a field of wheat, silhouetted against a cloudless blue sky on a dreamy sunny afternoon. The chances are that most people reading this sentence can easily picture a bucolic scene in their mind's eye. This ability to read a description of a scene and then imagine it has always been uniquely human. But this precious skill may no longer be ours alone.

Anyone thinking that these kinds of imaginings are far beyond the ability of today's computing machines will be surprised by the work of Hiroharu Kato and Tatsuya Harada at the University of Tokyo in Japan.

These guys unveiled a machine that can translate a description of an object into an image. In other words, their computer can conjure an image of an external object not otherwise present. That's a pretty good definition of imagination — in this case of the computational variety. Read more...