What is the difference between matrix() and as.matrix() in r?

Question

I ran the following in R and received the same output for both matrix() and as.matrix() and now I am not sure what the difference between them is:

Answer 1

matrix creates a matrix from the given set of values. as.matrix attempts to turn its argument into a matrix.

Further, matrix() makes efforts to keep logical matrices logical, i.e., and to determine specially structured matrices such as symmetric, triangular or diagonal ones.

as.matrix is a generic function. The method for data frames will return a character matrix if there is only atomic columns and any non-(numeric/logical/complex) column, applying as.vector to factors and format to other non-character columns. Otherwise, the usual coercion hierarchy (logical < integer < double < complex) will be used, e.g., all-logical data frames will be coerced to a logical matrix, mixed logical-integer will give a integer matrix, etc.

The default method for as.matrix calls as.vector(x), and hence e.g. coerces factors to character vectors.