CS 111 Lecture Notes - Lecture 4: Alan Perlis, Digitizing
Document Summary
A program is a description in a programming language of a process that achieves some result. An algorithm is a description of a process in a step-by-step manner. The same algorithm could be written in many languages. How we interpret the 0"s and 1"s in a computer memory any way we want. Even the notion that the computer understands numbers is an interpretation. We encode the voltages on wires as 0"s and 1"s, 8 of these define a byte. We can string together lots of these numbers together to make usable text. The computer power doubles for the same dollar every 18 months . Meaning: your computer processing power doubles every 18 months. To digitize it, we break it into parts where we cannot perceive the parts. By converting them, we can more easily manipulate them, store them, transmit them without error, etc. We can only digitize media because human perception is limited.
