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
If you’ve heard of an 8 bit cpu, 64 bit CPU, etc., that’s how many bits long each number is as it’s being worked on by the CPU. The more bits, the bigger the number that can be represented. If you have 8 bits, you can store an unsigned integer up to 255, or a signed integer from -128 to 127 (the system usually used for storing negative integers is called [twos complement](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4qH4unVtJkE))
The rest of the videos on that channel are relevant to this question, there’s also nandgame.com
Basically everything is a number, a letter for example is just a number that’s the index to where the letter’s image is stored in a font table. RGB color is just three numbers, one representing the brightness of each color.
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