San Francisco (CNN Business) Even a toddler can figure out the right way to put together a pizza: you roll out the dough, add some sauce, sprinkle on cheese, put the toppings on, then pop the whole thing in the oven.

It's a much trickier task for a computer to grasp, however. How does it know what to do first? Whether cheese should go on before or after sauce? Is there a right way to arrange toppings? And what about that whole baking thing?

. The researchers presented a Researchers at MIT and the Qatar Computing Research Institute set out to answer these questions with a recent project in which they taught artificial intelligence to, well, not exactly make a pizza but, more precisely, figure out the order in which it should be constructed. Essentially, the researchers built an AI system that can look at a photo of pizza and deduce what ingredients should go on which layer of the pieThe researchers presented a paper on their work last week at an AI conference in Long Beach, California.

It might sound silly, but there's a bigger point than creating AI that knows whether pepperoni should be placed on top of cheese.

Computers can already learn how to identify specific objects in images, but when some of those objects are partially hidden (say, arugula laid atop prosciutto), it gets harder for them to figure out what they're looking at. And with food, which often has many different layers (think a lattice-topped pie or a salad), it can be particularly tricky for a computer to figure out what should go where. To see a picture and say it's a pizza is easy. To be able to break it down into its various parts and reassemble it is a bit closer to understanding.

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