Every picture on a screen is made of tiny squares called pixels, and every pixel is stored as numbers. Crack the codes and paint the pictures!
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PICTURES AS NUMBERS
A screen picture is a grid of pixels. The computer stores a number for every pixel.
For a black-and-white picture, 1 can mean black and 0 white. Each 0 or 1 is called a bit.
Run-length coding counts how many of the same colour come in a row: "3 white, 2 black". Big blocks of colour shrink a lot. Busy patterns can get longer!
Colour screens mix red, green and blue light. Each is usually a number from 0 to 255. (255, 255, 255) is white and (0, 0, 0) is black.
One wrong number makes a glitch. Real files use extra check numbers to catch mistakes.