Understanding the initialization of the Needleman-Wunsch algorithm I would like to ask why when we initialize 0 as the starting point, there are 3 gray boxes that are not used as shown (highlighted in the red box) in the pic?

 Are these boxes to show that they are gaps or just to align them properly?
The first column is added in order to be able to align the sequences. They might be gaps if the alignment ends up beginning in different positions than the first. Without the first empty row and column it wouldn't be possible to have gaps at the beginning of the alignment

The dynamic programming is useful because you need first to calculate the score for each position, and then once you have the score, you can calculate the optimum path. So you solve your problem by first calculating what would happen if (there was a gap, there was a mismatch...) and then you find the optimum alignment.