What? My point is that I drew the same doodle for different words, and for each word it put forth a different _first_ guess.

The first guess for each doodle was the word that was provided -- if this software was completely legitimate, I would think it should have guessed the same word for each (and then moved on to other guesses).

They weren't really the same though, right? Only similar.

A good test for that would be to script the game and give it pixel-identical answers for each questions and see if the result is different.

Correct that they were not identical, but they were quite close; five lines that looked like a 'w'.

FWIW it guessed my lightning correctly (a simple `z` like shape). Its 2nd guess was "zig-zag" and the 3rd one "star" for some reason. So it really looks like for this network a zig-zag and a star are more similar than I would've guessed.

I guess a star is a zig zag looping on itself, kinda.

I wonder if the zig-zag drawing and the stairs were actually as similar as you remember.

For instance, our sub-conscious tendency when drawing stairs would be to have straight lines at 0 and 90 degrees but a "zig-zag" wouldn't necessarily have that feature. Thus, even though you thought the drawings were the same, there were sufficient detectable differences for the AI to recognize.