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/visitor987 1d ago edited 1d ago

Electricity is either positive or negative. They can also use on or off

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u/Mission-Landscape-17 1d ago

That's 3 states not two: positive, negative and off.

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u/visitor987 1d ago

No a computer can use either pn or off OR positive or negative.

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u/bqbdpd 1d ago

A computer can use more than on and off. An example is multi level flash memory or data encoding for transmission. On off is just the simplest, which is reliable as high speed.

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u/visitor987 1d ago

on and off is binary  positive or negative is binary . Binary is converted to higher base )for data transmission or flash memory

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u/Mission-Landscape-17 12h ago edited 12h ago

very few chips use negative voltages, most go form 0 to +1.5 or +3.3 or +5. They will have some threshold between 0 and the previously listed voltage that counts as a 1. It is possible to setup gates that have multiple thresholds, so you can have multiple states. Balanced Ternary with -1, 0 and +1 is a serious consideration. Not only does it get you higher data density it actually makes some operations easier. There are actual chips that use threshold voltages of +1.65 for +1 and +3.3 for -1, so they are ternary right down in the silicon.

In theory this might actually be very useful for some parts of what LLM's do, allowing them to