Boolean logic
Computers don’t understand ambiguity. Conversely, human language is very ambiguous. We can do this because we regard the full context of a conversation. For example, the sentence “Do you like coffee or tea?” could be interpreted in two different ways:
- It could enquire whether you like one over the other
- It could enquire whether you like either of them
Depending on the context, both Tea or Coffee and Yes or No are possible answers to that question. Computers, however, only know about what you tell them at any given moment. So, a computer would be happier with the sentence “If you needed to choose any of the two options, do you like coffee or tea?” But then again, how do you express all this in code?
To deal with this, an intelligent mathematician came up with Boolean logic, named after that intelligent mathematician himself, George Boole. This small, unambiguous language makes it easier to talk to computers. It concerns...
