IT Systems Concepts

In the previous chapter we have seen how we can use binary patterns, physically implemented as the two-state devices of a computer memory, to represent information in a wide variety of forms.We have looked, in some detail, at the representation of numbers, of text, and of pictures, and briefly at some other complex file structures, and we may well have come to the conclusion that perhaps we really can represent any real-world object by means of binary patterns in a computer memory. For all practical purposes, this is indeed the case.We may recall that the reason for this unbounded diversity of what can be represented from such simple patterns stems from the limitless sets of rules that we may use to interpret and manipulate them. In all that we have talked about so far, however, the processes of applying the different rules of interpretation to the various binary patterns have all been carried out, by each one of us individually, in our minds.These processes have then revealed to each one of us the “meaning” of a particular pattern given a particular interpretation. Another way of looking at this is that we have extracted information from data.