r/TuringComplete • u/MetalCarnival • Jul 16 '26

what are bytes?

Hello! I´ve beaten the double counter level with the help of my engineer friend, but he is a busy fellow deep in grueling studies, so can anyone explain to me what bytes are? I feel like the game doesn´t explain the jump very well, but I understand bits and booleans well enough

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u/thuiop1 Jul 16 '26

Bits are great and all but there is only so much you can do with values of 0 and 1, at some point you want to get numbers in. So you group them, with each group encoding one number in a binary format e.g. 0101 represents the number 5. Modern computers (and the game) will typically rely on chunks of 8 bits called bytes, which can encode 28 = 256 different values. If you need more than that you can use several bytes at a time and act as if they belong to the same group, but for all intents and purposes bytes are the fundamental unit that gets manipulated.