why does computers language only have 0 &1?
In: 8
Computers only operate in binary because that’s the way electricity works. The transistors, circuits, and components in your computer can quite easily distinguish between “electricity coming down wire” and “no electricity coming down wire”.
You could build computers that utilize other numbering bases, but then you have to distinguish between “no electricity”, “medium electricity”, and “a lot of electricity”, or more fine gradients of “how much electricity”.
When programming computers that is all abstracted away, and we just use programming languages that in some regards resemble just normal english with a lot of added symbols and specific structure added.
The 0 and 1 mean that a transistor is either off or on.
A CPU is made of billions of little switches that are all either off or on depending on the instruction and that’s what makes the calculations using things called ‘logic gates’
Trying to make it have more values like ‘Off, Low, Medium, High’ etc… is very difficult and there’d be constant confusion and misreading of the voltage, especially now with things so tiny.
So ultimately all computing language comes down to which transistors are on or off
Because 1) it is easy to implement, and 2) you don’t really need more.
It is easy to process the signal, when there is only 2 states: you just compare to middle value and crank up the difference.
And you can always combine several 0s and 1s to create more states, so you never really need more.
Inside a computer, those 0s and 1s are represented by different amounts of electricity. For example, a 0 might be represented by a wire with zero volts (0V) and a 1 might be represented by a wire with five volts (5V).
If we wanted, we could make circuits that represent the numbers 0-9 with 0V, 1V, …, 9V. But those circuits are much more difficult to make. It’s really simple to make circuits that can detect the difference between 0V and 5V. The circuits can be built so that 0-2 V is considered a zero, and maybe 4-6 V is considered a one.
Once we have circuits that can operate on 0s and 1s, then that’s sufficient to do any computation we want.
A computer (or any electronic device) has 2 true states: On or off.
When you break an electronic device down to its very basics the device either has power or not. In this scenario we’ll use a light bulb to represent our basic electronic device.
Let’s say that we are both deaf and do not know sign language. I can show you a light bulb and designate that off is no and on is yes. This is great but what if I wanted to say “maybe”? Well, I’ll use 2 light bulbs and make 1 on and one off mean maybe. 2 on now means yes and 2 off still mean no.
We can infinitely make new meanings by just adding more combinations and more light bulbs. This is how we tell a computer what to do. We make combinations of 1s and 0s represent different things. We can even use this language to create easier to interpret languages (modern day programming languages)
Firstly for a computer to work its magic, the most important ability it needs is the ability to do additions.
All a computer does is add a bunch of numbers together.
For example, you deposit $3 from your bank, your account balance increases by 3.
If you withdraw $3 from your bank, your account balance increases by -3. (still achievable with addition)
We humans count with base 10, in other words we have digits from 0 to 9. However we can also achieve the same using only base 2 with only digits 0 and 1.
we can convert numbers in base 10 to base 2.
3 -> 11
4 -> 100
8 -> 1000
… etc
Hence its only a difference in representation and also storage.
So why do we use base 2(only 0 amd 1)? This is largely due to the limitations of physics. It’s much easy and quicker to only have 2 choices and determine which is the current situation.
For example
bright-> 1 dark -> 0
loud-> 1 silent -> 0
For computers, we made use of silicon because of its unique property to differentiate 0 and 1 and also because we were able to master it.
In conclusion, it’s the intersection betwee math and natural physics that made us have only 0 and 1. If someday someone manage to master something else that is more powerful, for example quantum, we might actually get to see more digits then.
Stay safe and stay curious 🙂
It doesn’t need to. In the early days of experimentation with electronic computers there were computers built that didn’t use binary: there were analog computers, there were computers that used base 10 (like us) and there were at least proposals for ternary computers, although I don’t think any actually got built.
But in the end binary won out for two related reasons: simplicity and cost. The engineers found it was much simpler to reason about, and therefore predict, the behaviour of binary systems, and the circuitry to build them was simple and easy to mass produce (essentially you just need a device that can switch things on and off electronically, i.e. a valve or (later) a transistor).
The simplicity meant that binary computers were far less prone to going wrong, and far cheaper to produce.
Computers use transistors to do most of their storage and processing of data. A modern computer has billions of transistors in it. Transistors are a simple circuit element that can be put into one of two states: we refer to those states as high or low, on or off, 0 or 1. While it’s possible to construct a computer using circuit elements that can be put into more than 2 states, it’s far less efficient and far more expensive to do so, and it doesn’t really make the computer any better.
Because it is enogh to deacribe ANY data.
However there are computer which operates on 0,1,2 (ternary computers) and more.
Eg google use lots of ternary computer in neuron network. Ternari systems are more efficient with havy logic load
Short answer, because it’s the easiest way to represent s number with electric current
1 = some electric current
0 = no electric current
Having more numbers would require you to distinguish different levels of electricity, which would be very hard…
Latest Answers