Does a PC know what a 0 is?

[Telebubbies]

Hey guys. Sorry if this is in the wrong Topic section, but I think that I should post it here. I am good with working on PCs and I also code some Java. Now at my school there is this really old lady who tried trash talking me about how a PC works in class. She says this: "A PC does not know what a 0 is. Only the numbers about it" or something like that. I do know that the system takes the number as nothing. It practically has no value. But I just want to ask you guys if a PC does know what a 0 is or does it not? 

In my country not everyone is good with technology.. (South Africa). 

 

Anyway, please answer. Ask if you don't understand what I am exactly talking about. 

[Telebubbies]

Oh yes, and can you please give a reason for your answer. I am trying to get her to understand why she is wrong. But it is hard to explain. 

[suchamoneypit]

It knows what a 0 is. It operates in 0's and 1's. On or off;electricity or no electricity. If it is a 0, thats a state; off, which has a value and the computer understands.

 

010010010110011000100000011010010111010000100000011001000110100101100100011011100010011101110100001000000110101101101110011011110111011100100000011101110110100001100001011101000010000001100001001000000111101001100101011100100110111100100000011101110110000101110011001011000010000001101000011011110111011100100000011000110110111101110101011011000110010000100000011010010111010000100000011101010110111001100100011001010111001001110011011101000110000101101110011001000010000001110100011010000110100101110011001000000110110101100101011100110111001101100001011001110110010100111111

[Telebubbies]

1 minute ago, suchamoneypit said:

It knows what a 0 is. It operates in 0's and 1's. On or off. If it is a 0, thats a state; off, which has a value and the computer understands.

I am talking about taking a zero in as a value. Not as in binary. 

Like, if you say in a program that the answer is 5, it identifies that integer as a 5, but if it is a zero, it does identify that integer, but as a value that holds absolutely nothing. So in a way, the system does know that there is, in fact a 0.

 

This is a bit complicated. Lol 

[ChrisCross]

as said in binary code a zero is quite litteraly nothing. 

[suchamoneypit]

2 minutes ago, Telebubbies said:

I am talking about taking a zero in as a value. Not as in binary. 

Like, if you say in a program that the answer is 5, it identifies that integer as a 5, but if it is a zero, it does identify that integer, but as a value that holds absolutely nothing. So in a way, the system does know that there is, in fact a 0.

 

This is a bit complicated. Lol 

the fact that 0 represents nothing, is a value. Which means it is something.

[Telebubbies]

1 minute ago, ChrisCross said:

as said in binary code a zero is quite litteraly nothing. 

Yes, but would you tell a class that a computer does not know what a 0 is? Or would you say that it does know and identify the 0, but it takes it as a value of nothing? 

[Enderman]

8 minutes ago, suchamoneypit said:

It knows what a 0 is. It operates in 0's and 1's. On or off;electricity or no electricity. If it is a 0, thats a state; off, which has a value and the computer understands.

 

the 0 you type on a screen is not a 0

the 0 is actually id 48

the compiler then translates 48 to 00110000

 

which is then translated into "off" and "on" digital pulses of electricity

 

TLDR a computer only knows what on and off is

we as humans uses 0s and 1s to represent off and on

a computer doesnt know that,

to it "0" is the same as "5" is the same as "#" is the same as the letter "z" 

[ChrisCross]

Just now, Telebubbies said:

Yes, but would you tell a class that a computer does not know what a 0 is? Or would you say that it does know and identify the 0, but it takes it as a value of nothing? 

i think it identify's it as an empty value. and then outputs like above.

[typographie]

14 minutes ago, Telebubbies said:

Yes, but would you tell a class that a computer does not know what a 0 is? Or would you say that it does know and identify the 0, but it takes it as a value of nothing? 

It probably depends on what you're doing. I know I've definitely typed a "0" in code before. But perhaps 0 was not a valid entry for whatever you were doing at the time, and the person telling you that just needed to be more specific as to why.

[NumLock21]

Computer read information in 0s and 1s, you want to know if a computer reads the number 0 as a 0 or does it use some other method to read it as 0.

The number 0 to a computer reads it as 00110000.

This was mentioned by @Enderman

 

01111001 01101111 01110101 01110010 00100000 01110100 01100101 01100001 01100011 01101000 01100101 01110010 00100000 01101000 01100001 01110011 00100000 01110111 01100001 01111001 00100000 01110100 01101111 01101111 00100000 01101101 01110101 01100011 01101000 00100000 01110100 01101001 01101101 01100101 00100000 01101111 01101110 00100000 01110100 01101000 01100101 01101001 01110010 00100000 01101000 01100001 01101110 01100100 01110011 00100000 01101100 01101111 01101100

[Telebubbies]

4 minutes ago, typographie said:

It probably depends on what you're doing. I know I've definitely typed a "0" in code before. But perhaps 0 was not a valid entry for whatever you were doing at the time, and the person telling you that just needed to be more specific.

She says these exact words

"I cannot give you zero for your work as a computer does not know what a zero is". But I keep telling her that a zero is nothing. It is identified by the computer, but it takes the actual value as zero. So the computer does know what it is, it does accept the integer and it does use it. 

 

Well, thanks for your guy's help. Now I have more arguments.

[Enderman]

2 minutes ago, NumLock21 said:

Computer read information in 0s and 1s, you want to know if a computer reads the number 0 as a 0 or does it use some other method to read it as 0.

The number 0 to a computer reads it as 00110000.

a computer does not read 0s and 1s

0s and 1s is the human way of understanding binary

 

a transistor only understands on and off

a PC only understands (many) ons and offs

 

we humans need to think of it as 0s and 1s because its easier to use numbers than words

[NumLock21]

1 minute ago, Enderman said:

a computer does not read 0s and 1s

0s and 1s is the human way of understanding binary

 

a transistor only understands on and off

a PC only understands (many) ons and offs

 

we humans need to think of it as 0s and 1s because its easier to use numbers than words

I know, was trying to let op know, we know what he's trying to ask.

[mariushm]

Computers work with two states,  state and NOT state , negative and positive, true or false.

Basically, the smallest unit normal computers (the ones we know of) can work with is a BIT, which can have two states, 0 or 1, discharged and charged (with electricity). Programs can extend this by operating with series of bits to achieve lots of things.

There are computers out there designed to work with 3 states for each bit but they're really rare and there's also quantum computers which work very differently so let's not go there.

 

Computers don't have a concept of 0 (zero) or numbers, they just work with series of bits. We the humans decided that a series of eight bits should represent a character and that for simplicity of mathematical operations a series of bits made of a single FALSE bit should mean the value 0 in order to make additions and other arithmetic operations simple.

 

We also decided that on x86 computers each series of 8 bits should represent a byte, the smallest unit that can be stored in memory or disk (there are architectures that use 7 bits or 9 bits in a byte or use 15bit words and have no concept of bytes) and made a table with common characters and assigned numbers to them, so that when the video card receives a series of 8 bits, it shows a character on screen - as you can see a few posts above, if you want to show the character "0" on screen, the program running on the computer has to send 8 bits representing the value "48" to the video card.  Of course, I'm simplifying this by a lot.

 

[swifty7]

what you refer as some rare computers having 3 states, those ARE quantum computers.
 Quantum computers don't use binary, what it uses are qbits and qbits have 3 states: 1, 0, 1/0.  At the moment there are only maybe 4 or 5 quantum computers in the world.  

[Godlygamer23]

12 hours ago, Enderman said:

0s and 1s is the human way of understanding binary

Binary code at least. Binary is certainly not limited to 1s and 0s. 

[LukeTim]

A computer doesn't "know" anything. It does not comprehend abstract concepts like nothing.

However, it can represent a 0 with a word where all bits are unset. (I think this is the answer you were looking for, @Telebubbies)

 

Some CPU architectures have (or have had) a Zero register. This is a register which always contains the number 0 and can only ever be read from... perhaps in this sense it could be said to "know" what zero is. I believe in many UNIX systems if you read from /dev/null then internally the driver is simply reading and outputting the value of this zero register.

 

38 minutes ago, Godlygamer23 said:

Binary code at least. Binary is certainly not limited to 1s and 0s. 

What do you mean?

[Andrewf]

A computer does as it's told, but knows not what it is doing. ON and OFF. Good, and Evil. With great power comes great responsibility. With quantum computing comes great responsibility. With great power comes great responsibility. With quantum computing comes great responsibility. With great power comes great responsibility. With quantum computing comes great responsibility. Illuminati confirmed, human eye can't see more than 9 fps, bush did 9/11.

[Enderman]

7 hours ago, Godlygamer23 said:

Binary code at least. Binary is certainly not limited to 1s and 0s. 

well, most people call it 0 and 1 because "off" and "on" is too long to say, and it would be a waste of power if a translator had to turn 2 or 3 characters into on and off rather than 1 character

[KuJoe]

In most languages aren't "0" and 0 two different things? "0" is a value of the number zero while 0 (no quotes) is a null/false/empty value right? That being said. Our computers don't know shit, they are told what they know and until you tell your PC what a 0 is it doesn't know.

[KuJoe]

Also, even a complete void is nothing but still identified as something. To say something doesn't exist by definition makes it exist.

 

 

Time for more Nyquil shots because the flu sucks!  

[colonel_mortis]

Think of a number in a computer like the bucket. In the same way that you can still talk about the bucket existing, even if it's empty, the computer still understands a number even if all its bits are set to zero. A region in the computer's memory is dedicated to that number, so if that region contains just zeros, that is just as valid as it being filled with ones, or anything else. 

[Mira Yurizaki]

Zero is something that represents another thing. To us in our modern age, this isn't really a problem. We have people who accept the concept of nothingness and there should be something to represent it.

 

In computers, the data represents something, and it's up to us humans to decide what that data value represents and apply the rules we've developed for it to follow. There's nothing stopping you from saying that 0x41 needs to represent the letter 'A'. There's nothing stopping you from saying the "off" state is 0.

 

Does a computer know what zero is? No. But it doesn't know what anything else is either. Without rules to follow, a computer can't do anything.

[Brenz]

On 02/06/2016 at 9:41 PM, Telebubbies said:

She says these exact words

"I cannot give you zero for your work as a computer does not know what a zero is".

If that is at all true its either a bug with the software she is using or a setting somewhere in the software. In that sense a computer can certainly understand what the value 0 is.