Ok, so I know that the alphabet of computers consists of only two symbols, or states: zero and one.
I also seem to understand how computers count beyond one even though they don’t have symbols for anything above one.
What I do NOT understand is how a computer knows* that a particular string of ones and zeros refers to a number, or a letter, or a pixel, or an RGB color, and all the other types of data that computers are able to render.
*EDIT: A lot of you guys hang up on the word “know”, emphasing that a computer does not know anything. Of course, I do not attribute any real awareness or understanding to a computer. I’m using the verb “know” only figuratively, folks ;).
I think that somewhere under the hood there must be a physical element–like a table, a maze, a system of levers, a punchcard, etc.–that breaks up the single, continuous stream of ones and zeros into rivulets and routes them into–for lack of a better word–different tunnels? One for letters, another for numbers, yet another for pixels, and so on?
I can’t make do with just the information that computers speak in ones and zeros because it’s like dumbing down the process human communication to the mere fact of relying on an alphabet.
In: 264
The way i finally understood it, is that the transitor and layout is not arbitary, the computer isn’t decoding anything on the fly and knowing what that means, the individual transitors do not matter so much as the combined ones set up to detect a certain string which flows because of that.
Imagine you have the instruction 0000 0000. The creator of the computer sets up the first 2 digits as the operation, say “10” is addition, that unlocks the flow down one path for the rest of the digits (where the other paths are blocked).
You also have move instructions; “1100 0100” might mean “move the value from data storage area A to the graphics card” and “1101 0100” might mean “move the value from data storage area A to the calculator”, and the individual instruction might be exactly the same between the two, but because the layout is setup differently, will use them differently.
Each instruction is meaningless in of itself; there is nothing that makes one instruction inherently a colour or a letter.
If you want to know more, play the “turning complete” game.
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