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We know a regular computer basically only knows two states and that we name these states 0 and 1 respectively. This seems arbitrary, we could name them "a" and "b", or even 3 and 4. Is there a reason for the convention of naming them 0 and 1 ?

Martin Maat
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Mehedi Hasan Shifat
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    @gnat again, not a dupe: that linked question is about not-base-2 systems (e.g. fuzzy or analog data representations). This question is about naming or interpreting states in a base-2 system. – amon Jul 28 '18 at 14:14
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    Does it actually matter what you call those two states? Only for effective communication with others, the computer doesn't care. – Deduplicator Jul 28 '18 at 14:25
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    There are two states, but you could call them anything: a/b, 0/1, red/green, true/false, good/evil, on/off. True/false is sometimes used when talking about boolean logic, but the benefit of 0/1 is that you can treat them as digits in the binary numbering system which meany you have a simple way of representing numbers digitally. Using 3 and 4 would just be confusing for no benefit. – JacquesB Jul 28 '18 at 14:39
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    In 1847, George Boole, wrote "THE MATHEMATICAL ANALYSIS OF LOGIC, BEING AN ESSAY TOWARDS A CALCULUS OF DEDUCTIVE REASONING.", in which he detailed a two state numeric system, where multiplication is taken as conjunction and addition as disjunction (and 1-x as negation, as well as the use of strings of 1/0's to represent quantities), creating the foundations of binary arithmetic: we call this boolean logic, and using it we can represent quantities, perform addition, subtraction, multiplication, all based on simple operations (and/or/not) on single binary digits. – Erik Eidt Jul 28 '18 at 15:17

2 Answers2

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It most certainly is not arbitrary. Computing is rooted in mathematics. Binary notation in mathematics is also known as base-2.

Base-10 gives us 0-9 digits. Base-8 (octal) uses 0-7, and base-16 (hexadecimal) use 0-9 and a-f to represent the extra six digits not present in decimal notation.

The thing is, no matter what base you're using, zero is always zero, and one is always one. So, once you're using base-2 notation, you're pretty much resorting to 0 and 1.

The very earliest computers were actually decimal - used purely for calculations. Then mathematics started to incorporate logic, and computing theory really think of, and thanks to things like Turing completeness, and transistor states (on or off), computer scientists realised that true/false logic and base-2 mathematics were the best way to achieve the general purpose machines we use now.

HorusKol
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It's not really true that they are (always) named 0 and 1. It depends on your point of view.

If you're dealing with numeric values, the computer does it in base-2, having the two digits named 0 and 1. And as numeric values make for very important computer applications, this naming is indeed very popular.

But a single bit can also stand for a boolean value false or true, often abbreviated as F and T.

From an electrical engineering point of view, a bit is represented by one of two voltage levels, being High and Low, abbreviated as H and L. And the mapping from H/L to T/F can come in both vesions. The natural mapping is that H stands for 1 or T, and L for 0 or F. But sometimes the hardware designers choose to make L mean the active (true) state of the signal, and H the inactive (false) state: that's called "active-low".

Ralf Kleberhoff
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