 So now that we've learned how to do basic programming, you know working with math and whatnot We all always run into now The little issue of having a little bit more control over what the program does so far We've just been very factual. Oh do this do this do this but now we run into the situation where I want to be able to kind of Pick a different route. I want it to say do this only in certain scenarios certain cases That's where we get selection statements to come into play. So for example, take a look at these two circles Do you agree that the one on the left is a circle? All right, you might say yes it is no it's not but at what point in time Do we no longer classify it as a circle? For example, if I drew a circle out here that looked something like this Is that a circle? All right, is that a circle? No, that last one over there that guy he looks more like an oval. Well, this is actually where computers start to get that same idea we have to sort of make the decision happen and so Conditional statements, they're actually sort of the foundational blocks of what we call fuzzy logic or artificial intelligence in computer programming because again Computer is only going to be able to figure out If something is something if we tell it to so just like we see on here, you know this one close enough So, how do we do that? So we introduce a few new keywords if and Else now the if statement the if statement is what's going to Pretty much initiate that conditional statement when we write out the if statement It's going to come out with something like this If and then this is going to be some conditional statement That will evaluate out to true or false if it's true cool We do whatever is inside of the if block if it's false and Does not happen. That's actually where this else block will come into play And whatever we have inside the else block will occur when it is false We do this by using a lot of different Comparison operators. We've started to talk about augmented assignment operators iteration operators assignment operators More operators there are so many operators in programming, but we have those again just like we learned with Multiplication and division. I don't have any symbol Like this for multiplication. I don't have that big Just dot or in division. I don't have sort of those guys either I don't have that symbol on my keyboard the same thing happens when we're looking at our Conditional statements from math class. I don't have say for example this guy or this guy So what do I do? Well in our case as programmers we use the symbols that are available to us I have the less than symbol I have the greater than symbol if I slap an equal sign to the right of that That becomes what we call our less than or equal to and our greater than or equal to and the same kind of thing if I'm looking at Doing a comparison, you know, I'm unable to do just a simple this Because that's our assignment operator. It's already being used the program already knows how to do that and it's only one thing So what we do we slap that equal sign to the right of that and then suddenly This becomes a completely new symbol for me This is now does this Equal this instead of this will equal this I hope that makes a little sense then we have this last little symbol right here Well exclamation mark and that's actually known as my not equal to and the same kind of concepts going on here You know our computer doesn't have that symbol So how do I work that and you'll find that a lot of programming languages that exclamation point is sort of used To go ahead and just indicate this is a not symbol