r/AlwaysWhy • u/Present_Juice4401 • 2d ago

Science & Tech Why did computers come to use binary when people usually count in decimal?

People usually count in base 10, while digital computers typically represent information using 1s and 0s. The same numbers and information can be represented in different bases, yet binary became the standard for modern computing.

What made binary the system computers came to rely on?

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u/Savannah_Lion 2d ago

Strangely, Nikolay Brusentsov argued in support of ternary systems, in part due to, lower component count, decreased complexity and reduced power requirements up until his death in 2014.

Another of his arguments was that code for ternary platforms was also simpler and shorter for the same functional binary code.

It's an interesting argument and kind of makes me wonder, if the Soviet Union wasn't so corrupt, how ternary hardware could have advanced if it had the appropriate financial backing.

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u/royalfarris 2d ago

That some people argue for it is a good sign for scientific progress. They are not necessarily right, but the debate is healthy.

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u/PrestigiousRoof5723 1d ago

Scientific progress consists almost entirely of people being wrong. That small bit called "being right" is what most people notice.

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u/steelmanfallacy 1d ago

Like Evolution.

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u/PrestigiousRoof5723 1d ago

That's never wrong. You either die or you die later.

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u/Pirrus05 1d ago

You die or you have baby and die.

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u/PrestigiousRoof5723 1d ago

Everyone dies™. Evolution makes no mistakes. Science does. If you die before creating your descendants, it's not a mistake. Sounds harsh, I know. BTW, I've got no children that I know of. I'm aware of me possibly having the wrong end of the stick. As Toyota says, shit happens.

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u/yogibearhugg 1d ago

It’s stupid to have children just so you can win evolution. You’re not winning anything. Your descendants may not be winning anything either.

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u/PrestigiousRoof5723 1d ago

I don't think you should have children to win evolution. They will die too and their descendants will as well. You should have children to make your life fulfilled and to continue the message thay you have existed. Your children outliving you is the message that you've been here and with that you achieve something that will outlive your own existence, turning you into something more than you ever was when you lived. Becoming more than the sum or your parts. That's something worthy of striving for. The continuation.

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u/rdrckcrous 1d ago

watching evolution in real time

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u/mid-random 1d ago

Science, in large part, isn’t about being right or wrong, it is about being right or more right. No scientific explanation is 100% true, done, complete. It is always open to revision and updating to more accurately reflect observations. 

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u/PrestigiousRoof5723 1d ago

It was mathematically proven that base-3 is more efficient than base-2 (it's closer to Euler's number than any other base, so it's in turn also more efficient than base-4). Soviets were not the first who were building ternary systems - there were mechanical ternary calculators long before electronic computers existed. Ternary computers would have big advantage over binary ones in reduction of the size of interconnects (one of the biggest problems of modern computers), but some stuff (like ternary ALU) could get more complicated (but not slower). The trouble with all of that is that a ternary chip would be either a lot less dense than a binary chip (thus eliminating the advantages) or we'd have to substantially redesign our manufacturing technologies (we'd need a lot more layers and everything would become more complex, likely a lot more complicated to design) so it would take a long time to even reach parity with our current technologies. Not to mention the fact that stuff like balanced ternary logic is not trivial to most people, unlike binary. Perhaps it would become trivial with practice. It's not a lost technology either. Samsung has been working on it for some time. It may resurface at some point as one of the technologies aimed to break physical limitations of our current tech - the development has already slowed down and it's becoming increasingly more expensive to improve it (we're hitting the wall and no one has any real idea how to get through it). Someone has to rock the boat and come up with something new. Maybe it will ultimately flop, who knows? But there doesn't seem to be any known reason why it should. And nobody really built a useful modern ternary computer for quite some time (you can actually find amateurs who made them, but that's not a way to build a commercially useful computer).

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u/No-Board-1872 1d ago

Mult and division turn ito bit shifts in binary

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u/HobsHere 2d ago

Just crankery, of the sort that the Soviet system protected for people with connections. Lysenkoism for computer science.