It’s All Just Bits

Defining “Computer Science” is tricky, and there are many competing definitions. My view is that Computer Science is primarily concerned with “HOW to do things with information?” In fact, many languages don’t even call our discipline Computer Science; for example, it’s “informática” in Spanish, “Informatik” in German, and “informatique” in French. It’s usually a good idea to start simple. What is the simples information we can have? An answer to a yes/no question seems like the simplest information we can have. We will represent a “no” as 0, and “yes” as 1. We will call a single digit that can be either 0 or 1 a bit. The term “bit” was coined by John Tukey at AT&T’s Bell Labs in 1947 and stands for binary digit. We will now proceed to demonstrate that a large variety of information can represented as bits. This process is known as digitization. It has been transforming our society at a rapid pace and its implication are still not well-understood. In fact, our intuition, used to thinking of information in the analog world, often lets us down when dealing with digital information. We will provide some examples of that below.