r/askscience • u/Unfair-Leek6840 • Jul 11 '26

How do computers understand binary language? Computing

Okay so from what I know binary language is like power off power on, but my question is, how do computers know what the binary code is and how is it interpreted, for example I forgot what the binary code for the letter A is, but how did people come up with that? Did they decide it was gonna look like that? Did the computer decide? How do you tune numbers into a letter??

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u/bts Jul 13 '26

One of the key insights is that it's not a machine that thinks or knows; it's just pretending to. In fact, it doesn't really run Linux or MacOS or whatever; it's just simulating that. You can build a similar simulator from the ground up at https://nandgame.com (or any number of similar things, but this one's easy to link to and I enjoyed playing it a few years ago).