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Google has revealed a set of images created by a computer while it was "dreaming".

The strange pictures were produced by an artificial neural network - a form of machine intelligence - being researched in the depths of Google's labs.

The search giant said it "trains" the network by showing it millions of images and gradually asks it to recognise features of them by stacking them into layers.

The gradual analysis of the images (which could be of anything from trees, to animals, to people) then allows the machine to recognise an object. The goal is being able to differentiate a dog from a tree, for example.

Where these weird images come from is when Google took just one aspect of the layer analysis and asked the network to enhance it. So an image of a person was suddenly enhanced by a part of the network trained to recognise dogs.

The company calls this technique “Inceptionism”

"Instead of exactly prescribing which feature we want the network to amplify, we can also let the network make that decision,” said Google’s Alexander Mordvintsev.

"In this case we simply feed the network an arbitrary image or photo and let the network analyze the picture.

"We then pick a layer and ask the network to enhance whatever it detected.

"Each layer of the network deals with features at a different level of abstraction, so the complexity of features we generate depends on which layer we choose to enhance.”

In essence, it’s a very smart way to make some very trippy visuals.