How Computers Understand English
We know a computer is just an electronic device. All it has are some chips, ICs, power controls, etc. It understands only 1s and 0s — yes, binary.
But wait! How can 1s and 0s represent our language?
Let me explain:
A computer interprets 1 as ON and 0 as OFF. Does that make sense? Not yet? Alright, let me elaborate. Computers have memory made up of capacitors and transistors. When the memory is charged, it represents 1 (ON), and when it’s not charged, it represents 0 (OFF). The way capacitors and transistors work together to store data is a more complex topic, which I will try to cover in another blog post.
Now, let’s look at a simple mathematical computation of counting using a basic computer chip made of 4 such switches (made of transistors and capacitors).
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Algorithm 1:
This is a simple logic:
- If only switch 1 is ON, the count is 1.
- If only switch 2 is ON, the count is 2.
And so on. But as you can see, with 4 switches, we can only count up to 4 using this method.
Algorithm 2:
We can arrange 4 switches in 16 different ways (i.e., 2^n, where n is the number of switches). So with 4 switches, we can count from 0 to 15. This is the most efficient way of counting.
Thus, 4 switches can count from 0 to 15.
Each switch represents 1 bit of memory. So with 4 bits, we can count up to 16 different numbers.
8 bits make up a byte, and with 1 byte of memory, we can count up to 2²⁸= 256 numbers.
Now, let’s say I want to write the letter ‘A’. We use a standardized code to represent each character, called ASCII (American Standard Code for Information Interchange). According to the ASCII table, the binary code for ‘A’ is 01000001 (decimal: 65). Therefore, we need 1 byte of memory to store the letter ‘A’.
In this way, each character is stored with the help of such switches.
I hope this helped in understanding how computers converts and process our language.
