Anti-aliasing is a technique used to reduce aliasing, which makes curved or slanted lines appear jagged when displayed on a lower resolution output device like a monitor. Aliasing occurs because the device lacks enough resolution to smoothly represent curved lines. Anti-aliasing works by adding subtle color changes around lines, which causes jagged edges to blur together when viewed from a distance. There are several anti-aliasing techniques, including increasing the display resolution, area sampling to shade pixels based on the area covered by thickened lines, and post-filtering by generating a higher resolution virtual image and averaging it down.