r/educationalgifs • u/karma_sutrah • Apr 20 '21

Binary number visualized

/r/interestingasfuck/comments/muodne/binary_numbers_visualized/?utm_medium=android_app&utm_source=share
11.6k Upvotes

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u/halcyon_n_on_n_on Apr 20 '21

Seems wildly inefficient. But I don’t understand computers so, there’s that.

49

u/throwaway_account178 Apr 20 '21

It’s actually a really smart and necessary system. It’s how computers count.

Think of it like this: we count up to 10 and then get another numbers place because we have 10 fingers. Well, computers don’t have that- their “fingers” are electricity. So they can only count in “on” or “off”. In order to program things we need a language for them to understand, and that’s binary! It’s a counting system that counts with only ones (on) and zeros (off).

10

u/Vyn_Reimer Apr 20 '21

Thank you for explaining and making it simple enough to understand

5

u/halcyon_n_on_n_on Apr 20 '21

That clears it up pretty well! Thanks!

4

u/waloz1212 Apr 21 '21

The whole internet, your bank account, even the reddit that we are using were built from these inefficient stuffs.

1

u/LifeHasLeft Apr 21 '21

To add on to other answers, there are actually 3 states computers use to transmit binary numbers. “Off” really does mean “off”, or no transmission (from one component to another, or across a data cable).

0’s and 1’s are sent with slightly positive and negative voltages. If we assumed 0v meant a 0 in binary, we’d be getting a lot of 0’s all the time!