From the course: Computer Science Principles: Digital Information

Yes and no answers with binary

From the course: Computer Science Principles: Digital Information

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Yes and no answers with binary

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- Are the lights on? The answer is pretty simple. It's either yes or no. When you ask yourself that question, there are only two possible answers. This is the basis of all computers. Two or binary. Binary is a system where there only are two possible states. Yes or no, on or off. Computers contain trillions of these binary switches and they all indicate states of on or off. There are a couple ways we can represent a binary state. One is with something called a Boolean value. Booleans are values that contain two options, true or false. So you can make a statement like, "I have more than three pencils." And the answer would either be true or false. The other way is using numbers. Numbers represent a lot of different things in the computing world but these numbers will represent the most basic elements of our computer. In binary, the number one represents on and zero represents off. Binary information can be stored and communicated by using states of on or off. Microchips have logic gates in them which use electricity to determine the on and off signals. Storage devices can change and save binary states to be able to access them later. And networks can communicate by sending signals with on and off states defined within them. A signal binary state is called a bit. It is the smallest amount of storage you can measure. Using this basic unit, we can build larger and more complicated representations of information and create a way for us to take things that we recognize everyday and represent them using these tiny values called bits.

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