Chinese New Year: Google launches special AI drawing game to commemorate Year of the Dog

The game has seen more than a billion drawings so far

Technicians work on a Hey Google booth in front of the Las Vegas Convention Center in preparation for the 2018 CES in Las Vegas, Nevada, U.S. January 6, 2018 (REUTERS/Steve Marcus)

Google is celebrating the Chinese New Year by asking you to doodle.

But the party doesn't just require any doodle. Google's special artificial intelligence will ask you to draw a specific doodle – and then test how good it is at guessing what you've drawn.

The feature is both a fun game and also a smart way of encouraging people to train its image recognition AI. That technology will then go on to power a range of different Google features.

At the moment, for instance, Google allows users to doodle an emoji and have it turned into the character they were looking for. In the future, it's likely that such technology will become much more advanced, powering all sorts of features across Google's products.

Neural nets of this kind can train themselves by looking at a wide variety of inputs, teaching themselves to recognise drawings. But they need the drawings in the first place, and that's why Google has launched its game.

So far the AI has looked at more than a billion different images, and people have drawn more stars in the game than can be seen in the night sky.

The update is ostensibly Chinese New Year themed. But that really only means that dogs and other related items like shoes appear, in keeping with this year's animal – though thousands of people have already drawn dogs since the feature launched in 2016.

The special Year of the Dog version can be found by clicking here. The traditional version can be found here.

Once you've finished the very fun doodle challenge, you'll be given the chance to review your own drawings and share them. You can also check what the Google AI thought you'd drawn, and how other people responded to the same prompts.