Iconary is an AI-driven, Pictionary-style online game developed at the Allen Institute for Artificial Intelligence. Publicly released in February 2019, the game is designed to encourage collaborative communication between a human player and the AI player AllenAI. Iconary is the first demonstration of an AI system capable of playing a Pictionary-like game with a human partner.[1]
 | |
Type of site | Game |
|---|---|
| Created by | Allen Institute for Artificial Intelligence |
| URL | iconary |
| Launched | February 2019 |
Researchers at the institute intended Iconary to highlight the potential of collaborative communication with an AI agent in a game setting, as contrasted with other highly publicized AI-backed games that place humans in adversarial roles against an AI system. Pictionary creator Robert Angel noted of Iconary "it’s not me against you, it’s us as a team against another team”.[2]
The AllenAI system behind Iconary can compose scenes based on a given phrase for the human player to guess, as well as attempt to guess a phrase depicted by the human player. The AllenAI system combines elements of computer vision, natural language understanding, and commonsense reasoning to compose scenes or to make guesses about a scene.[3] The system was trained using data from collaborative games between two human players, using over 75,000 unique phrases and a constrained set of 1,200 icons.[4] The phrases used in Iconary describe complex scenes or activities, e.g., “people jogging in the park” or “engineer riding a train”. The limited vocabulary of icons requires players to create novel combinations of icons to communicate a phrase to their partner, and to make use of abstract symbols (like arrows to signify motion) or contextual clues (like a stethoscope next to a figure of a person to signify "doctor") to successfully depict a concept.
References
edit- ^ "AI2 Creates World's First AI to Play a Pictionary-like Game". Psychology Today. Retrieved 2019-03-06.
- ^ "What does the Seattle man who invented Pictionary think about its artificial-intelligence use?". The Seattle Times. 2019-02-08. Retrieved 2019-03-06.
- ^ Knight, Will. "An AI is playing Pictionary to figure out how the world works". MIT Technology Review. Retrieved 2019-03-06.
- ^ "Play Iconary, a simple drawing game that hides a deceptively deep AI". TechCrunch. Retrieved 2019-03-06.