Lower Elementary AI

When you look at a picture on a tablet, you see colors, shapes, and maybe even your favorite character. You see smiles, trees, pets, and people. But a robot does not see the way you do. You have eyes and a brain that help you understand what you are looking at. A robot has a camera, but it does not truly "see" a dog or a tree. Instead, it sees something very different.

Every picture on a screen is made of tiny dots called pixels. A pixel is a very small square. If you could zoom in very close to your screen, you would see that the picture is really made of many tiny squares lined up in rows and columns. Each of those squares has a number. The number tells the computer how bright or colorful that square should be. Some numbers make a square dark. Some numbers make it bright. Some numbers make it red, blue, green, or another color.

When all the little squares are placed together, they form a picture. To you, it looks like a smiling face. To a robot, it is a big grid of numbers. The robot stores that picture as a list of numbers arranged in rows and columns. That is how robots "see." They do not see with understanding. They see with math.