How To Tell Computers What To Do
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Problems Imagine that you have just been given one hundred arithmetic problems to do and you need to work out all of the answers before you can have any leisure…
Computer Science
How Machines Communicate
Data needs to be transferred from one location to another, this is a fundamental concept in Computing, for example: Regardless of whether the data is being sent the short distance…
An Introduction to Logic, or, How Aristotle Helped to Invent the CPU
The series of events that made it possible to develop hardware capable of performing computation extend a very long way back through time. As long ago as the fourth century…
Floating Point: -0.5
For example, represent the value -0.5 as a twos complement floating point number with an eight bit mantissa and a four bit exponent. The twos complement of -0.5 is 1.1.…
Floating Point Binary Numbers
While fixed point binary offers a simple approach to representing real numbers, the range of numbers that we can represent is limited. A more common, but slightly more complex approach…
Real numbers – Fixed Point Binary
So far we have seen how we can express whole numbers, both positive and negative using binary but we also need to understand how we can express fractional numbers, that…
What’s with all the negativity, “twos compliment”?
The concept of the minus symbol is very useful. Without it we could not perform subtraction, keep track of who owes money to whom, how many degrees it is below…
Bit Shifting
There is a very simple method that can be used to multiply and divide binary numbers. This method is called bit shifting. Shifting Bits What is the easiest multiplication that…
Add like a computer
How do computers add? To understand how binary addition works, it is useful to first think about how addition works in general and it is probably easiest to consider how…
Powers of Two
Computers use patterns of binary values to represent absolutely everything (including the numbers and characters to graphics and sounds in computer games). It’s very important to know how exactly how…