Little Bits of Artificial Intelligence

1. STORY: “The Language of Robots in the Fruit Shop”

Imagine we have a robot working in a fruit shop.Each morning, the shop owner tells the robot what fruit to arrange — say, Apple, Banana, or Cherry.

But the robot doesn’t understand text like humans. It needs numbers — not words — to process information.

So, if the owner says: “Today, arrange Banana.”

We can’t feed “Banana” as-is into the robot’s neural network brain. Why?

Because computers don’t understand text directly. Also, using labels like:

Apple = 0, Banana = 1, Cherry = 2 can confuse the robot into thinking:

Cherry (2) is more than Apple (0)

But that’s not true — these are categories, not numbers to be ranked.So the fruit manager comes up with a new language:

Use a One-Hot Encoding system!

Here’s the new fruit code:

• Apple → [1, 0, 0]
• Banana → [0, 1, 0]
• Cherry → [0, 0, 1]

Each fruit has its own unique identity — no ordering, no confusion!

So now when the owner says “Banana,” the robot gets: [0, 1, 0]
and can act accordingly.

2. WHY ONE-HOT ENCODING IN NEURAL NETWORKS?

Neural Networks use vectors of numbers as input. One-Hot Encoding ensures:

• Categorical variables are converted to numerical form.
• Each category gets a distinct, equally distant vector.
• It removes ordinal assumptions (no false hierarchy).