• Question: Why do you think pictures will work better in computers than binary?

    Asked by gracec2001 to Willem on 11 Mar 2014.
    • Photo: Willem Heijltjes

      Willem Heijltjes answered on 11 Mar 2014:

      Hi Gracec2001!

      Thanks for your question – I like talking about my research!

      The computer will still be binary – what I want to change is the language a computer uses in-between the binary and the programming language you see. How it will work, is like this:

      If you think of computation as “doing your sums”, then you know that there are often smart ways and not-so-smart ways of doing the same calculation: for example, take for instance:

      (134 * 24) + (66 * 24) (the * means “times”)

      But for a computer, it is often really hard to see the smart way. So what we do instead, is to change the way the computer works: we change the internal language it uses – from words to pictures, in my case! Then we design the language in a clever way, so that *every* way of doing the sums is smart!

      Hope that makes sense!

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