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  • Hi, I’m Carrie Anne and welcome to Crash Course Computer Science!

  • Today we start our journey up the ladder of abstraction, where we leave behind the simplicity

  • of being able to see every switch and gear, but gain the ability to assemble increasingly

  • complex systems.

  • INTRO

  • Last episode, we talked about how computers evolved from electromechanical devices, that

  • often had decimal representations of numberslike those represented by teeth on a gear

  • to electronic computers with transistors that can turn the flow of electricity on or off.

  • And fortunately, even with just two states of electricity, we can represent important information.

  • We call this representation Binary -- which literally meansof two states”, in the

  • same way a bicycle has two wheels or a biped has two legs.

  • You might think two states isn’t a lot to work with, and you’d be right!

  • But, it’s exactly what you need for representing the valuestrueandfalse”.

  • In computers, anonstate, when electricity is flowing, represents true.

  • The off state, no electricity flowing, represents false.

  • We can also write binary as 1’s and 0’s instead of true’s and false’s – they

  • are just different expressions of the same signalbut well talk more about that in the next episode.

  • Now it is actually possible to use transistors for more than just turning electrical current

  • on and off, and to allow for different levels of current.

  • Some early electronic computers were ternary, that's three states, and even quinary, using 5 states.

  • The problem is, the more intermediate states there are, the harder it is to keep them all

  • seperate -- if your smartphone battery starts running low or there’s electrical noise

  • because someone's running a microwave nearby, the signals can get mixed up... and this problem

  • only gets worse with transistors changing states millions of times per second!

  • So, placing two signals as far apart as possible - using juston and off’ - gives us the

  • most distinct signal to minimize these issues.

  • Another reason computers use binary is that an entire branch of mathematics already existed

  • that dealt exclusively with true and false values.

  • And it had figured out all of the necessary rules and operations for manipulating them.

  • It's called Boolean Algebra!

  • George Boole, from which Boolean Algebra later got its name, was a self-taught English mathematician in the 1800s.

  • He was interested in representing logical statements that wentunder, over, and beyond

  • Aristotle’s approach to logic, which was, unsurprisingly, grounded in philosophy.

  • Boole’s approach allowed truth to be systematically and formally proven, through logic equations

  • which he introduced in his first book, “The Mathematical Analysis of Logicin 1847.

  • Inregularalgebra -- the type you probably learned in high school -- the values of variables

  • are numbers, and operations on those numbers are things like addition and multiplication.

  • But in Boolean Algebra, the values of variables are true and false, and the operations are logical.

  • There are three fundamental operations in Boolean Algebra: a NOT, an AND, and an OR operation.

  • And these operations turn out to be really useful so were going to look at them individually.

  • A NOT takes a single boolean value, either true or false, and negates it.

  • It flips true to false, and false to true.

  • We can write out a little logic table that shows the original value under Input, and

  • the outcome after applying the operation under Output.

  • Now here’s the cool part -- we can easily build boolean logic out of transistors.

  • As we discussed last episode, transistors are really just little electrically controlled switches.

  • They have three wires: two electrodes and one control wire.

  • When you apply electricity to the control wire, it lets current flow through from one

  • electrode, through the transistor, to the other electrode.

  • This is a lot like a spigot on a pipe -- open the tap, water flows, close the tap, water shuts off.

  • You can think of the control wire as an input, and the wire coming from the bottom electrode as the output.

  • So with a single transistor, we have one input and one output.

  • If we turn the input on, the output is also on because the current can flow through it.

  • If we turn the input off, the output is also off and the current can no longer pass through.

  • Or in boolean terms, when the input is true, the output is true.

  • And when the input is false, the output is also false.

  • Which again we can show on a logic table.

  • This isn’t a very exciting circuit though because its not doing anything -- the input

  • and output are the same.

  • But, we can modify this circuit just a little bit to create a NOT.

  • Instead of having the output wire at the end of the transistor, we can move it before.

  • If we turn the input on, the transistor allows current to pass through it to theground”,

  • and the output wire won’t receive that current - so it will be off.

  • In our water metaphor grounding would be like if all the water in your house was flowing

  • out of a huge hose so there wasn’t any water pressure left for your shower.

  • So in this case if the input is on, output is off.

  • When we turn off the transistor, though, current is prevented from flowing down it to the

  • ground, so instead, current flows through the output wire.

  • So the input will be off and the output will be on.

  • And this matches our logic table for NOT, so congrats, we just built a circuit that computes NOT!

  • We call them NOT gates - we call them gates because theyre controlling the path of our current.

  • The AND Boolean operation takes two inputs, but still has a single output.

  • In this case the output is only true if both inputs are true.

  • Think about it like telling the truth.

  • Youre only being completely honest if you don’t lie even a little.

  • For example, let’s take the statement, “My name is Carrie Anne AND I’m wearing a blue dress".

  • Both of those facts are true, so the whole statement is true.

  • But if I said, “My name is Carrie Anne AND I’m wearing pantsthat would be false,

  • because I’m not wearing pants.

  • Or trousers.

  • If youre in England.

  • The Carrie Anne part is true, but a true AND a false, is still false.

  • If I were to reverse that statement it would still obviously be false, and if I were to

  • tell you two complete lies that is also false, and again we can write all of these combinations

  • out in a table.

  • To build an AND gate, we need two transistors connected together so we have our two inputs

  • and one output.

  • If we turn on just transistor A, current won’t flow because the current is stopped by transistor B.

  • Alternatively, if transistor B is on, but the transistor A is off,

  • the same thing, the current can’t get through.

  • Only if transistor A AND transistor B are on does the output wire have current.

  • The last boolean operation is OR -- where only one input has to be true for the output to be true.

  • For example, my name is Margaret Hamilton OR I’m wearing a blue dress.

  • This is a true statement because although I’m not Margaret Hamilton unfortunately,

  • I am wearing a blue dress, so the overall statement is true.

  • An OR statement is also true if both facts are true.

  • The only time an OR statement is false is if both inputs are false.

  • Building an OR gate from transistors needs a few extra wires.

  • Instead of having two transistors in series -- one after the other -- we have them in parallel.

  • We run wires from the current source to both transistors.

  • We use this little arc to note that the wires jump over one another and aren’t connected,

  • even though they look like they cross.

  • If both transistors are turned off, the current is prevented from flowing to the output,

  • so the output is also off.

  • Now, if we turn on just Transistor A, current can flow to the output.

  • Same thing if transistor A is off, but Transistor B in on.

  • Basically if A OR B is on, the output is also on.

  • Also, if both transistors are on, the output is still on.

  • Ok, now that weve got NOT, AND, and OR gates, and we can leave behind the constituent

  • transistors and move up a layer of abstraction.

  • The standard engineers use for these gates are a triangle with a dot for a NOT,

  • a D for the AND, and a spaceship for the OR.

  • Those aren’t the official names, but that's howI like to think of them.

  • Representing them and thinking about them this way allows us to build even bigger components

  • while keeping the overall complexity relatively the same - just remember that that mess of

  • transistors and wires is still there.

  • For example, another useful boolean operation in computation is called an Exclusive OR - or XOR for short.

  • XOR is like a regular OR, but with one difference: if both inputs are true, the XOR is false.

  • The only time an XOR is true is when one input is true and the other input is false.

  • It’s like when you go out to dinner and your meal comes with a side salad OR a soup

  • sadly, you can’t have both!

  • And building this from transistors is pretty confusing, but we can show how an XOR is created

  • from our three basic boolean gates.

  • We know we have two inputs again -- A and B -- and one output.

  • Let’s start with an OR gate, since the logic table looks almost identical to an OR.

  • There’s only one problem - when A and B are true, the logic is different from OR,

  • and we need to outputfalse”.

  • To do this we need to add some additional gates.

  • If we add an AND gate, and the input is true and true, the output will be true.

  • This isn’t what we want.

  • But if we add a NOT immediately after this will flip it to false.

  • Okay, now if we add a final AND gate and send it that value along with the output of our

  • original OR gate, the AND will take infalseandtrue”, and since AND needs both values

  • to be true, its output is false.

  • That’s the first row of our logic table.

  • If we work through the remaining input combinations, we can see this boolean logic

  • circuit does implement an Exclusive OR.

  • And XOR turns out to be a very useful component, and well get to it in another episode,

  • so useful in fact engineers gave it its own symbol too -- an OR gate with a smile :)

  • But most importantly, we can now put XOR into our metaphorical toolbox and not have to worry

  • about the individual logic gates that make it up, or the transistors that make up those gates,

  • or how electrons are flowing through a semiconductor.

  • Moving up another layer of abstraction.

  • When computer engineers are designing processors, they rarely work at the transistor level,

  • and instead work with much larger blocks, like logic gates, and even larger components

  • made up of logic gates, which well discuss in future episodes.

  • And even if you are a professional computer programmer, it’s not often that you think

  • about how the logic that you are programming is actually implemented in the physical world

  • by these teeny tiny components.

  • Weve also moved from thinking about raw electrical signals to our first representation

  • of data - true and false - and weve even gotten a little taste of computation.

  • With just the logic gates in this episode, we could build a machine that evaluates complex logic statements,

  • like ifName is John Green AND after 5pm OR is Weekend

  • AND near Pizza Hut”, thenJohn will want pizzaequals true.

  • And with that, I'm starving, I'll see you next week.

Hi, I’m Carrie Anne and welcome to Crash Course Computer Science!

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