Riassunto
What is computation? In its broadest sense, computation is the process of using a defined procedure to transform input data into output data. Consider this everyday example: when you wake up in the morning and decide to make a cup of coffee. You first gather the necessary ingredients (input), such as water, coffee grounds, and sugar. Then, you follow a specific series of steps or a procedure (process) – like measuring the water, heating it, and mixing it with the coffee grounds. The result is a freshly brewed cup of coffee (output).
In this analogy, making coffee resembles a computational process, where you start with raw inputs, apply a series of steps, and produce a final result. In digital computation, this process occurs within a computer and involves data and algorithms, transforming inputs (like numbers or commands) into outputs (like calculations or decisions).
This book explores digital computation, aiming to use this notion to demonstrate how modern computer systems actually work. We begin with the simplest units of digital computation: the bit. These bits are assembled in very specific ways to represent multimedia data that we use in our daily lives, such as music, videos, text, and numbers. The computer has a very clever way to manage and manipulate these bits. It can compress them and share them within the same computer as well as with other computers. When sharing information in any shape or form, the computing system needs to make sure that the data is protected and arrives at its destination as intended.
To understand how computers perform these complex tasks, we explore the building blocks of digital circuits. Logic gates are the simplest devices that perform computation in a computer. They take bits as inputs and produce new bits as outputs, based on logical rules. By combining these logic gates, we can perform more complex operations like addition and subtraction. In fact, the central processing unit (CPU), which can be seen as the brain of the computing system, consists largely of logic gates.
Logic gates and computing components are seen as hardware devices. What's amazing about these devices is that they can be built to be programmable devices. This means that we can use the same computing component, like a CPU or computer memory, to represent and solve many different problems.
Lastly, we end the book by exploring the limits of computation. That is, the boundaries of what computers can and cannot do. As useful as computers are, it turns out that there are many problems which computers cannot solve, and for many where solutions do exist, it is not reasonable to implement them. By the end of this book, readers will have a comprehensive understanding of computation in computer systems and be able to apply that knowledge to solve problems using computation.
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