FROM afar this image could be a photograph of Stephen Hawking. Zoom closer and you can see it’s a pretty good sketch, the kind a street artist might rustle up for tourists. Yet this is not the work of any human hand but of a robot.
The Aikon robot was created by Frédéric Fol Leymarie and Patrick Tresset, computer scientists at Goldsmiths, University of London. It attempts to recreate the thought process that Tresset, a former draughtsman, unconsciously moves through when drawing someone’s face. First, Tresset identifies the face’s orientation and looks for shaded regions, subconsciously working…
