The lost BINARY
Ever wondered why they use binary system in the memory at the lowest level in computers? I had an interesting discussion with my friend Manikanta Avinash. This is the summary of those ramblings..
At the hardware level, i.e. SILICON logic gates are the ones that store the information. Now the gate is either on or off. This is what establishes the binary. Now thinking of storing different levels of on/off doesn't make sense in this case. Right ?
I thought, why can't we have some hierarchial structure in these gates. So, we can explode the binary system into many more levels. This ultimately when zoomed in, we are talking about some unit of logic gates which performs similar to a single logic gate but with more levels. Ultimately, the no. of gates is limited. Now what can we do in these cases ?
Manikanta suggested, we should be looking for a new hardware level methodology. Something in which we can store and get the information of the state of the lowest building unit of memory. Now we came to Quantum Computing. Here we talk about things in probability. It immediately struck me, how amazing is it would be if the information is stored in these. There are infinitely many states available if we go to Quantum level. Retrieving the state info could be hard. But if possible, Mani commented, how our mobile would turn out to be a super computer... Imagine the possibilities. You won't be talking in Giga/Tera/Peta bytes. The scale explodes like the Big Bang.
Awesome brain storming discussion..!
At the hardware level, i.e. SILICON logic gates are the ones that store the information. Now the gate is either on or off. This is what establishes the binary. Now thinking of storing different levels of on/off doesn't make sense in this case. Right ?
I thought, why can't we have some hierarchial structure in these gates. So, we can explode the binary system into many more levels. This ultimately when zoomed in, we are talking about some unit of logic gates which performs similar to a single logic gate but with more levels. Ultimately, the no. of gates is limited. Now what can we do in these cases ?
Manikanta suggested, we should be looking for a new hardware level methodology. Something in which we can store and get the information of the state of the lowest building unit of memory. Now we came to Quantum Computing. Here we talk about things in probability. It immediately struck me, how amazing is it would be if the information is stored in these. There are infinitely many states available if we go to Quantum level. Retrieving the state info could be hard. But if possible, Mani commented, how our mobile would turn out to be a super computer... Imagine the possibilities. You won't be talking in Giga/Tera/Peta bytes. The scale explodes like the Big Bang.
Awesome brain storming discussion..!
When did you write this down? I was randomly browsing and saw this post.
ReplyDeletebeen a while.. so the problem solved by using quantum states. more states available than just 0 or 1.
ReplyDelete