Edit: Most of the answers here are wonderful and spot on.
For those who interpreted it differently due to my incorrect and brief phrasing, by ‘teaching’ I meant how does the computer get to know what it has to do when we want it to perform arithmetic operations (upon seeing the operators)?
And how does it do it? Like how does it ‘add’ stuff the same way humans do and give results which make sense to us mathematically? What exactly is going on inside?
Thanks for all the helpful explanations on programming, switches, circuits, logic gates, and the links!
In: 583
This is where we leave the realm of software and enter the world of hardware. Beware, it’s a dangerous place.
Hardware engineers have built a system where electricity races in a well timed and coordinated way to produce specific results based on the inputs. If you want to see the math work, more traceable examples can be found with water or marbles.
In a twist, it is the hardware that determines the software’s capabilities, not the other way around. We can only tell hardware to use what it has, and only if it has offered us a way to do so.
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