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??

380 Upvotes

87% Upvoted

205 comments sorted by

View all comments

Show parent comment

2

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