By this I mean, when you write code, what exactly gives that the power to do anything is it more code? 0’s and 1’s? more so, what gives that thing the power to do anything? At some stage I can only deduce what must just be magic making it work because it’ll boil down to something metal and plastic ‘talking to’ an electric current, which doesn’t make sense at all
In: Engineering
a lot of people are talking about how things become 1s and 0s, i’m going to talk a little bit more about how those 1s and 0s do stuff.
a really important thing that happened is that some guy named George Boole came along in the 19th century and figured out a way to do our normal math with just two numbers, 1s and 0s. this preceded our modern computer circuitry!
it just so happens that being able to do math with 1s and 0s is useful when you have stuff that cares whether there’s a current (1) or not a current (0). Early on people used this to do computations way faster than a human could do. Later on they might have hooked up a display or printer of sorts that might, based on a signal, spit out something when the math does something interesting. Eventually, with lots of money and lots of work and lots of miniaturization, this becomes displays, eventually this becomes video games, the internet, etc.
Basically: everything you do on a computer is some sort of math, and computers do that math with 1s and 0s
Edit: missing here is also mention of a person named Turing, who came up with a hypothetical machine that could follow instructions to do math. That was so foundational that we talk about computer languages as being “Turing-complete.” Boole and Turing together paved the way for random circuits (even if there are billions of them) to do something interesting, even to non-mathematicians, like run Crysis
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