The Babylonians used separate combinations of two symbols to represent every single number from 1 to 59. That sounds pretty confusing, doesn’t it? Our decimal system seems simple by comparison, with ...

In the late 1930s, Claude Shannon showed that by using switches that close for "true" and open for "false," it was possible to carry out logical operations by assigning the number 1 to "true" and 0 ...

Memo to the developers of superfast quantum computers: give up on the familiar 1s-and-0s binary system used in conventional computers. By switching to a novel five-state system, you will find it ...

While this question might sound a bit like a self-help guide for computers, it actually says something about how they work.

The computer, at its core, is an input-output device: it receives instructions, executes programmes, performs calculations automatically and produces results. Unearthed in 2012 from a tomb dated to ...