I kind of am starting to get logic gates but im still a bit confused on how they work in relation to a computer and what they actually do, also how many are there in like a pc?
In: Technology
You can reduce numbers to binary numbers, 1’s and 0’s.
You can reduce math (+ – x / etc.) to logic operations (and, or, not, xor, nand, neg).
Therefore, if you can build a device that can do simple logic operations on very small binary numbers (1 and 1, 0 or 1, etc.), then you have a computer because you can use BILLIONS of these devices tied together to do very complicated math with very large numbers.
A logic gate is a couple transistors wired together in such a way that it will do a logic operation. If you put 5 volts on the first input wire, and 5 volts on the second input wire, you get the “and” result of 5 volts at the output wire. In this case 5 volts represents a 1, so an and gate will be doing this:
1 and 1 (on the two input wires) = 1 (on the output wire)
1 and 0 = 0
0 and 1 = 0
0 and 0 = 0
The processor in a computer uses all these gates to do complex math on large numbers. Your computer screen expects 1920 x 1080 numbers from the computer, each number telling it how much to light up each dot of color (pixel) that the screen is composed of. Your mouse sends gps coordinates (sort of, it sends number coordinates) to the computer. Your keyboard sends number codes to the computer. Your printer is like a screen actually, it will shoot out droplets of color ink based on numbers that represent how much ink to shoot at a page.
So all of it is a large scale (billions) of logic gates doing math to generate numbers, which your brain then interprets as patterns of writing on a screen, controlling the screen with a mouse, typing things into a document, and so on.
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