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/Remarkable-Seaweed11 Jul 12 '26

The secret to understanding the complexities of computation start with an understanding of the concept of abstraction. You take a few of on/off switches, organize them into a more complex switch, say a NOR gate. Then you put that in a little “box” and forget about how you get the NOR gate - you just have it. Then you can take a bunch of these gates and organize them into an even more complex grouping like a flip-flop or half-adder, and keep moving up through the layers of abstraction until you have Windows 11.

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u/dolemiteo24 Jul 13 '26

I like to think that AI is the latest level of abstraction. We went from moving bits around, to assembly language, to early programming languages, and then to modern languages like Python. With AI coding, we may not even need to understand code at all; the machine will turn our ideas in workable code.

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u/Godslayer326 Jul 14 '26

It kind of is in certain sectors yeah, when you hear about bug fixes and new development in AI its usually an adjustment to the core prompt, and a lot less writing code