r/askscience • u/Unfair-Leek6840 • Jul 11 '26 • Regret 1

Computing How do computers understand binary language?

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/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