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 numbers

– like 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 means “of 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 values “true” and “false”.

In computers, an “on” state, 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

signal – but we’ll 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 just ‘on 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 went “under, 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 Logic” in 1847.

In “regular” algebra -- 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 we’re 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 the “ground”,

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 they’re 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.

You’re 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 pants” that would be false,

because I’m not wearing pants.

Or trousers.

If you’re 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 we’ve 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 output “false”.

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 in “false”

and “true”, 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 we’ll 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 we’ll 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.

We’ve also moved from thinking about raw

electrical signals to our first representation

of data - true and false - and we’ve 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 if “Name is John Green AND after 5pm OR is Weekend

AND near Pizza Hut”, then “John will want pizza” equals true.

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