Optical illusions take advantage of shortcomings in the visual system. Certain special designs can trick our brain as it's trying to process the information that's coming in. Learning more about what can trick our minds would help us learn more about the human mind itself. That's part of the reason why Robert Williams and Roman Yampolskiy, two researchers at the University of Louisville in Kentucky, want to develop machine learning systems that can create new optical illusions--they hope to learn more about the "very specific tricks that cause us to misjudge color, size, alignment and movement of what we are looking at," they wrote in a recent paper on their study. "It is also important to consider whether making a perceptual mistake similar to humans constitutes having a visual experience similar to humans."