By Remo Campopiano & Molly
It was a warm spring Saturday in Seekonk, Massachusetts, about 25 years ago. The asphalt in front of the garage had just been poured a few weeks earlier, and though it had hardened, there was still a soft give to it underfoot—a faint memory of the wet spring that had soaked the ground beneath it. That detail may seem unimportant, but memory is a funny thing. Some things stick not because they matter to the plot, but because they mattered to the moment.
I had gathered eight kids and a few of their dads for a meeting of our Robotics Art Club. These were 10- to 12-year-olds, bright, wiggly, full of questions, and their fathers, some more eager than others to be here. One of them, Cyrus’s dad, was a real scientist—was paid to think for a living, the whole deal. That would come in handy later.
I called the kids out to the driveway and had them spread out across the soft black asphalt. “Pick a spot, any spot,” I told them. “Now face in an arbitrary direction.”
One of the kids—a sharp-eyed boy named Ben—cocked his head. “What does ‘arbitrary’ mean?”
“Great question,” I said. “It means ‘whatever you want.’ Random. No reason. Just pick a direction and face it.”
They nodded, sort of. Kids accept definitions the way ducks accept weather: they roll with it, but they also watch closely.
Then I said, “Close your eyes. Now slowly spin in place until I say stop.”
This, of course, was a mistake—or maybe it was perfect. Chaos erupted. Some spun fast, some barely turned at all. A few lost their balance and stumbled into each other. One kid just started moonwalking for reasons still unknown to science.
“Stop!” I finally shouted, laughing. “Freeze! Now open your eyes. Whatever direction you’re facing now—that’s your arbitrary direction.”
One of the kids began bouncing lightly on his heels, unintentionally amplifying the subtle ripple of the still-floating asphalt beneath him—like a trampoline made of black tar. Another kid eagerly joined in. What they felt as funhouse-floor magic, I saw as a slow-motion disaster for my new driveway. Before it turned into a neighborhood sinkhole, I shouted, “Hey! Knock it off!”
Robert, one of the dads, chimed in with a deeper, more authoritative voice. “You know, this asphalt isn’t quite settled yet. It might feel like a bouncy pad now, but if it warps, you’re looking at cracks in a few weeks.”
The kids stopped immediately. Science and dad-voice—a powerful combo.
There were giggles, groans, and at least one dramatic fall to the ground.
Then I gave them their instructions:
- Take one step forward.
- Turn 45 degrees to the left.
- Take one step forward.
- Take another step forward.
- Turn 45 degrees to the right.
- Take one more step forward.
“After each forward step,” I added, “pause and look around. If you see another person or the end of the driveway within two steps, do an about-face—that means turn 180 degrees.”
That last bit introduced a beautiful wrinkle: feedback. Suddenly the path wasn’t fixed. It responded to what they saw.
The driveway came alive with kids stepping, turning, spinning around, bumping into one another. It looked like a very clumsy ballet choreographed by a mildly confused robot.
“This is like a knight’s move in chess!” shouted Alex, who would later join me in Second Life as “Job.”
“Sort of!” I said. “Except messier. And smellier. And more likely to result in lawsuits.”
Eventually we herded everyone back to the big table inside. The kids were sweaty and exhilarated. The dads had that look of amused concern parents get when they’re not sure if something brilliant just happened, or if they need to intervene.
I asked, “Okay, what just happened out there?”
“We got dizzy,” said Ben.
“True. But what else?”
“We followed instructions,” said Cyrus.
“And those instructions—step by step—that, my friends, is what we call an algorithm.”
They all perked up. This was the point.
“An algorithm,” I continued, “is just a list of steps you follow to get something done. Like a recipe. Or the instructions for building a robot. Or a dance routine.”
Cyrus’s dad leaned in. “And when a machine follows those steps, it can do things that look almost like thinking.”
“Wait,” said Alex. “Robots use algorithms to move?”
“Absolutely,” he continued. “But it gets cooler. Algorithms can learn. Or rather, they can be designed to adjust themselves based on what they see. Like when you all did an about-face if you saw someone too close. That’s a simple feedback loop.”
“So we were acting like robots?” asked Ben.
“Exactly. Very clumsy, loud robots with bad balance and questionable hygiene.”
They laughed.
Then Cyrus’s dad pushed up his glasses—not that he needed to—and said, “The real magic isn’t just in following the steps. It’s in what happens when the steps have to deal with the real world. That’s when things get interesting. That’s when intelligence begins.”
I straightened my back, looked him right in the eye, and asked, “Intelligence?”
He gave me a smile—patient, but excited. “Sure. Think of it this way. A simple algorithm just follows rules. But when you add feedback—like those about-face turns—it starts reacting. It adjusts. If it adjusts well, it can navigate new situations, not just the one it was designed for.”
Robert, the other dad, jumped in: “That’s the seed of thinking right there. Not memory. Not speed. Adaptation.”
“Exactly,” Cyrus’s dad said. “And the better it adapts, the more it starts to look like it understands something. That’s the threshold where algorithms begin to become intelligent systems.”
The kids were quiet. Not out of confusion, but awe. They had just danced the first steps of machine learning, right there on my driveway.
That day, the word “algorithm” stopped being a scary tech word. It became a tool. A lens. A way to think about how things—machines, people, systems—learn.
And Alex never forgot it. Years later, in a very different world made of pixels and code, he’d remind me of that day on the asphalt. “You were teaching AI before we even called it that,” he said.
Maybe. Or maybe I was just letting the kids dance their way into the future, one dizzy algorithm at a time.