Teach the Computer Cats
Choose which pictures to show a pretend computer so it learns properly, then choose one that would teach it something wrong.
- Ages
- 4 to 9
- Time
- 15 minutes
- You Need
- Crayons, paper, and a willingness to be the computer for a few minutes.
What to do
- Draw six cats. Make them properly different from each other. Different colours, different sizes, one enormous and bad-tempered.
- Colour them in. Then draw one more animal that is not a cat at all.
- You are now the computer. Say cat every time they show you a cat, and nothing at all for the one that is not.
- Now ask them to draw one picture that would teach you something wrong, and explain what damage it would do.
Ask afterward
- What would happen if I had only ever seen orange cats?
- Am I thinking about cats, or counting what I have seen?
- Who picked the pictures? Could they pick badly?
- What else could I get confused about?
For the grown-up
The last step is the one worth reaching. Being asked to teach the system wrong on purpose is what moves a child from understanding the mechanism to understanding that the mechanism can be aimed, which is the part with a twenty-year shelf life.
Read this first
What Is Artificial Intelligence?
The activity works on its own, and it works considerably better after the explanation it belongs with.
Read the explanation