Why do digital systems use binary(i.e base 2)number system & why not higher base number systems?

Question

why do modern engineers & scientists prefer binary number system to other number systems although we have so many number systems & most importantly binary number system is not found in nature? Secondly, although the human mind can comprehend much higher(read: more complex) number systems then why can't we design digital systems on such higher platforms?.... I mean what are the discrepancies in other number systems?

Answer 1

Electronics (especially transistors) have two states only: on and off. That's all there is to it. Remember that digital systems just consist of many different on/off states.

Answer 2

Because we are limited at this time by electronic systems that use on/off as the only way to store information.

Engineers use the digital system for everything but computers, and for those they use the octal(8) and hexadecimal(16) system too.

A silly example of other systems are the British/American measurements, just ask anyone how many inches and yards in a mile, teaspoons in a gallon, and why a ton is the same in metric and US standards.

Nature does the binary system (male/female) along with any others it can find (DNA could be viewed numerologically)

Because a person has ten fingers, the decimal system comes naturally and is easy to learn. Other number systems work as well but are a pain to learn, otherwise there is nothing wrong with them. (some code writers are able to do complex computations using either 2,8,16,or 10 based systems in their heads, it just takes practice)

Answer 3

Because most electronic devices are actually pretty stupid. Fast, but stupid. They know only two conditions-On or Off. Digital computers and storage devices are built around this principle. Variable state devices are much harder to work with and are more subject to external interference. Higher number systems can be used to represent binary data (and vice versa) and typically are for convenience, octal and hex are the two most common as they work directly with either 3 or 4 binary digits without having to convert place changes. Others could be used but would require considerable mental gymnastics to be effective.

These other number systems aren't defective or have "discrepancies" per se, but are more or less convenient to use in dealing with digital data.

Answer 4

Computers (and all digital technology) are based on the concept of the simple switch. The simple switch has two positions - on and off, hence the binary system. To use another number system, computers would need another basis altogether.

Answer 5

Many had answered you that it is all about electronics , that is true, two stetes are simpler to handle in electronic. but in fact even the ancient philosiphor studied logic in the binary system, since they decomposed complicated problems into true and false statements. Besides the well known computer(Newman machines) system is designed to make two decisions only. This simplify the design of algorithm.

Answer 6

First, transistors are ANALOG, we can interpret their outputs to be digital when we need digital outputs, but they also drive your iPOD headphones in analog.

However, the main reason is that the fundamentals of digital logic were developed BEFORE the invention of the transistor and the basis of digital logic is Boolean algebra, which uses TRUE and FALSE, or 1 and 0, as the numbering scheme.

Answer 7

All computer algorithms breakdown into Boolean logic. Basically, just true/false questions or 0s and 1s.

The source below gives some good examples of how these functions align into logic and what the coresponding electronics look like.

Answer 8

With the technology we have, the fastest machines we can build use binary logic. It would be possible to build hardware with more than two states per gate, but the complexity would make it slower.

Answer 9

there would need to be quite a bit of noise for a 0 or 1 to be mistaken for the other. this is why analogue tvs are on the way out