Basics of informatics
Before we dive deeper into the internals of the various architectures, now is a good time to revise the numeral systems, which will lay a foundation for understanding both data types and bitwise operations.
Numeral systems
In our daily life, we use the decimal system with digits from 0 to 9, which gives us 10 different 1-digit options in total. There is a good reason for that – most of us as human beings have 10 fingers on our hands in total, which are always in front of us and are great tools for counting. However, from a data science point of view, there is nothing particular about the number 10. Using another base would allow us to store information much more efficiently.
The absolute minimum required to store some information is two different values: yes or no, true or false, and so on. This lays a foundation for the binary numeral system that uses only two digits: 0 and 1. The way we use it is the same as in the case of decimal: every time...
