ABSTRACT
COMPUTERS HAVE ALWAYS been good at numbers and words, numbers because they are built into the very structure o f the machine, and words because letters can be so easily coded into numbers.
Images are another story. Although a picture can be easily repre sented as a long sequence of numbers giving the color of each pixel, those numbers don’t represent the things in the picture. A computer can use the numbers to show the picture on its screen. But it can’t per form operations such as “Delete the tree in the middle of the picture” in the same way that it could, for example, easily “Delete the third word in the sentence.”
