By the time one attains the legal age for driving

A driver’s education is handled differently depending on the local rules, even though driving any car is more or less the same. In some countries, driving education is a sensitive matter. Driving schools explain in detail how each part of the engine, transmission, and car works. Many of us may never need to open a clutch, disassemble it, see what is wrong with it, and then reassemble it. It is still important to understand its design and its function to optimize its usage.

This week, you will learn about the basic concepts of computing, the driving force of logic, its practical utilization, binary language, regular expressions, and the way languages translate into operations.

The introductory concepts will serve as a first approach to the more complex topics in the course. Mastering such concepts is not necessary, but you should be aware of these concepts no matter what your role is going to be—a programmer, an information technology (IT) specialist, or an educated observer. This week’s lectures will offer you real-world examples of the concepts for a better understanding.

An instruction to be executed is first placed into memory, which enables the processor to reach it and understand it. Once the basic information has been loaded, it is handed over to the control unit, which deciphers it and mandates the next step. The control unit may request more information from the user or the system through input. It may send something back to the user or to the system through the output or may need to perform operations. If the processor is required to perform mathematical or logical operations, then the values are loaded into the ALU and evaluated appropriately. Once the system has completed all the operations required by the program, it stores the set of instructions and connects the processor with the data to be computed. The processor is idle until it is required to perform new operations.

Having learned about the process of computation, let’s learn about truth tables for Boolean logic.

When you are in the driver’s seat of a car, the first thing you check is, generally, if the car is already turned on or if it is in its off state. The car being off involves a certain set of possibilities that involve the car’s static nature in the off state. For example, you can change fluids or tires easily when the car is off. If it is on, the possible actions you can perform using the car in a potentially (and most likely) dynamic state are quite different. For example, you can reach far-off places or simply enjoy some air-conditioning on a hot day.

Computers rely, in a significant manner, on the simple concepts of on and off states. Alternating on and off states within a series of 8 bits mean transmitting a number or a letter. An on or an off state as a signal can allow or disallow the passing of information from one system to another. The concept of on and off is scalable to many different magnifications.

The idea of logic applied in an insular manner is not always useful. For example, to reach a vacation spot by car while it is raining, you need to conjugate the states of two objects—the automobile itself and the windshield wipers. You may still reach the destination by keeping the car on and the wipers off. You will have a pleasant ride if both objects are in the on state at the same time. Similarly, for a more pleasant ride, you can have the radio or the air-conditioning or both on at the same time.

As mentioned earlier, the concept of on and off states is scalable to different magnifications. The most important aspect is that the states should also be interactive with the states of other objects. When encoding letters, you cannot assign an individual letter to a single bit, which can be either on or off. In that case, you would have an alphabet of two letters—A and B. You may conjugate multiple bits, and by checking their state as a group, you may encode multiple letters. You may also perform operations using operators such as and and or. In this case, the t group of bits (for example, the group that forms a byte) is not acting as a single element. However, at the interaction of multiple bits of information, the t group of bits act as individuals. For example, to perform a certain operation only when two bits (or flags) are on, you have to wait until both bits are on. If an operation can be performed if either one of the two conditions exists, but not unless at least one condition does exist, then at least one of those two flags should be on.

Similarly, you can identify the state of a particular concept (for example, a set of 8 bits, or a byte) composed of smaller elements by looking at the overall set of states of the elements that compose it. In the case of binary code, you may easily translate states into numbers. If you allocate eight flags, each one with the potential state of on or off, you may then extrapolate the overall meaning of the eight states as a group.

In the following example, the series of states indicate the number 0:

In the following example, the series of states indicate the number 1:

In the world of computing, the on state is represented by 1 and the off state by 0. In the following example, the series of states indicates the number 3:

Each location, starting from the far right, represents a power of 2. Conjugating with this the fact that, in computer science, you start counting from 0, you can then account for the value of any position within the 8 bits, as follows:

Each flag has the following values:

If a flag is on, consider that position as active and then add it to the total. For example, when you represent 3, the first and second elements from the far right are on, while the others are off. The values associated with these two positions are 1 and 2, which add to the value 3.

Increasing the number of bits (and thus bytes, if you increase by 8 bits at a time), you may code for many more numbers as well as characters and symbols.

Having learned about binary language used in computation, next, let’s discuss

The idea of regular expressions is similar to the initial scan that you perform over the entire set of cars in the parking lot. When the binary code gets large and relatively complex, you may use patterns to match what you are looking for with the text itself. This operation is quite useful when looking at large written documents. For example, you want to change all the occurrences of the word can to will. Such an operation, however, may, mistakenly, turn a can of soda into a will of soda. Therefore, this concept requires some management once the pattern is matched.

This technique is not only used in word processing but also in many other fields. Artificial intelligence uses pattern matching to identify concepts and extrapolate knowledge. Bioinformatics can use the same concepts to process deoxyribonucleic acid (DNA), looking for recurring proteins or matching areas.

A classic example of the application of this concept is when you are looking for the color gray over several documents. The peculiarity of the English language and, in particular, of the different spellings in which you can code words, depending on which type of schooling the writer received, is the winning component. If you are looking for both “gray” and “grey,” you can either perform two separate searches or create a regular expression that spells gr(a|e)y.

This expression looks for a pattern with an exact match on the first two letters, an a or an e on the third letter, and then an exact match again on the fourth, and last, letter.

Having learned about regular expressions used to find patterns in computation, let’s learn about languages in relation to machine operation.

You also learned about truth tables for Boolean logic, binary language, regular expressions used in computing, and languages in relation to machine operation.

Next week, you will be introduced to automata and the concept of state changes. You will also analyze the basic steps involved in computing a solution and solving problems.