COMP 273 Lecture Notes - Lecture 5: The Sketch, Edge Case, Bitwise Operation

• School: McGill University
• Department: Computer Science (Sci)
• Course: COMP 273
• Professor: Piotr Przytycki

Document Summary

All of the circuits that i have discussed up to now are combinational digital circuits. For these circuits, each output is a logical combination of the inputs. We have seen that these circuits can do arithmetic and other operations. But these circuits are not powerful enough to build a general purpose computer. A key element that is missing is memory. One way for you to remember it would be to write it down, say on paper. Then later you could just look at the paper. Another way to remember the number which is good for short term, is just to repeat the number over and over to yourself. You probably have some intuition about how a computer could write down a number. It could alter the state of some magnetic material, for example. What is less clear to you is how a computer could remember a number by repeating it to itself.