Question About PCs

[Steven W]

A friend of mine is doing an assignment and although I wouldn't expect anyone to write it for him do you know any websites that may help answer the following question:

Within the computer all data is stored and transmitted using binary codes. why is this?

[5lab]

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Binary_and_text_files

[Steven W]

great stuff, cheers

[yamangman]

"Friend" eh? Heard that one before, hahha.

Quite simply, it is the most efficient numery format to use.

Infact no it's not, it has been caluclated that the most efficient to use is base 2.718-somthing, but thats not the most logical thing to use really.

[yamangman]

You sure he's not looking for a resource more like this:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Computer_numbering_formats

[Dav0s]

because it is compltely digital? ie. true or false, yes or no, on or off

[5lab]

"Friend" eh? Heard that one before, hahha.

Quite simply, it is the most efficient numery format to use.

Infact no it's not, it has been caluclated that the most efficient to use is base 2.718-somthing, but thats not the most logical thing to use really.

erm. i didnt think that was true

from what i know, technically its much easier to transmit/store one of 2 states than anything else. think of it this way - a wire can hold up to 5v. if you send 2 states down that wire (0 and 1, ie binary), then you are sending either 5v or 0v at a time. if there is interfearance/corruption, it should still be pretty easy to read it as 1 or 0. however if you tried to send (say) up to 6 down the wire (0v, 1v, 2v, 3v,4v,5v) - with perfect transmission you'd be fine, but if the wire absorbed 2v somewhere you'd get mass mass corruption. same with a hard drive really.. if a magnet gets too close you should still see the difference between a 0 and a 1... incidentally this is why analog tv/radio signals seem to pick up more interfearance than digital - an analog signal has any infinite number of values (so *can* be more accurate than digital) however its very easy for a bit of that signal to be moved so the output is wrong (snow on the screen or a bit of hiss). this does affect digital, but not as much, and ecc can normally cope with whats less of the mess.

[yamangman]

erm. i didnt think that was true

from what i know, technically its much easier to transmit/store one of 2 states than anything else. think of it this way - a wire can hold up to 5v. if you send 2 states down that wire (0 and 1, ie binary), then you are sending either 5v or 0v at a time. if there is interfearance/corruption, it should still be pretty easy to read it as 1 or 0. however if you tried to send (say) up to 6 down the wire (0v, 1v, 2v, 3v,4v,5v) - with perfect transmission you'd be fine, but if the wire absorbed 2v somewhere you'd get mass mass corruption. same with a hard drive really.. if a magnet gets too close you should still see the difference between a 0 and a 1... incidentally this is why analog tv/radio signals seem to pick up more interfearance than digital - an analog signal has any infinite number of values (so *can* be more accurate than digital) however its very easy for a bit of that signal to be moved so the output is wrong (snow on the screen or a bit of hiss). this does affect digital, but not as much, and ecc can normally cope with whats less of the mess.

It is true. It is the optimum value to represent a number of any size/format using the minimal amount of states. It is infact true that base 3 is more efficient than base 2, but computers of course use boolean logic.

[TiG]

Different concepts being covered here i think.

Binary is being used in computers because of states, but it falls down because of the impossibility of storing all numbers, some receprocals etc are unable to be stored in binary.

2.718................ is e, its used in complex maths to make things easier and its complicated but its used to help with complex integrations

and is calculated by doing the following calculation
e = 1 + 1/1! + 1/2! + 1/3! + 1/4! etc etc

I'm fairly certain this could get complicated to explain but i believe if you are interested you can investigate it further with google.

TiG

[herulach]

As people have said,it all comes down to storage, its much easier (and indeed was the only thing posible back in the day) to store things as 1s and 0s (charged or discharged capacitor in memory, magnetized or unmagnetized, 1/2wavelength or full wavelength dip in a cd) than to have 3 states, but ternary logic is faster, and is a far more efficient way of storing data, if someone could do it properly.