EECS 1520 Lecture Notes - Lecture 5: Binary Number, Vermont Route 12, Octal

• School: York University
• Department: Electrical Engineering and Computer Science
• Course: EECS 1520
• Professor: John Hofbauer

Document Summary

Need to obtain a finite representation (approximation) of the world, sufficient for our computational needs and our five senses. Analog data: information represented in a continuous form. Digital data: information represented in a discrete form. Information is digitized by breaking it into pieces. The binary number system is preferred for representing these number. Why? a binary digit is 0 or 1, which can be represented by high and low state in an electronic signal. Electronic signals fluctuate digital signal is far more resistant to information loss because of distance between the two states. N bits produce n2 different bit patterns. Pair each different bit pattern with the thing being represented. Question: how many bits do you need to represent m unique things. Actual number of bits is often influenced by other factors, i. e. computer handles 8, 16, or 32 bits at a time. English language character set: 26 letters (upper and lower case), punctuation, numeric digits, etc.