“Autoencoding” is a process that reduces complex information to a small subset that the neural net believes to be most significant; in Broad’s dissertation, he reduced each frame of Ridley Scott’s Blade Runner to a 200 digit number, then invoked the net to reconstruct the image just using that data.
The result was nothing short of fantastic — the neural net, working naively to identify the significant elements of each frame, without human supervision, was able to capture the most important data so well that its reconstruction of Blade Runner triggered a copyright notice from Warner Brothers when he posted it to Youtube.
via Boing Boing
