Binary Digit


Also found in: Dictionary, Thesaurus, Medical, Financial, Acronyms.
Related to Binary Digit: byte

binary digit

[′bīn·ə·rē ′dij·ət]
(computer science)
bit
McGraw-Hill Dictionary of Scientific & Technical Terms, 6E, Copyright © 2003 by The McGraw-Hill Companies, Inc.
The following article is from The Great Soviet Encyclopedia (1979). It might be outdated or ideologically biased.

Binary Digit

(in information theory), a unit used to measure entropy and the quantity of information. An entropy of 1 binary digit (1 bit) has a source with two equiprobable messages. The term is derived from the fact that the number of binary digits determines (to an accuracy of 1) the average number of characters required to record messages from a given source in the binary code. Decimal digits (decit) are also used. The conversion from one digit to another corresponds to the change in the base of logarithms when the entropy and the quantity of information are being determined (10 instead of 2). The conversion formula is 1 decit = 1/log 2 bits ≈ 3.32 bits.

The Great Soviet Encyclopedia, 3rd Edition (1970-1979). © 2010 The Gale Group, Inc. All rights reserved.
References in periodicals archive ?
As a result, the studies show estimates for the amount of uniquely created information stored on paper, film, magnetic media, and optical devices, and the amount of uniquely created bits flowing through broadcasting, telephony, and the Internet, measured in the number of binary digits (0s and 1s) that represent this information.
How to measure "how much information"? Theoretical, methodological, and statistical challenges for the social sciences
The second person was also attached to an EEG amplifier and their PC would pick up the stream of binary digits and flash an LED lamp at two different frequencies, one for zero and the other one for one.
People can actually communicate via power of thought
30 frames per second), we actually have to send 221,184,000 binary digits per second.
Random access: I'll see you later teaching long distance, Star Trek style
(A field is a byte or group of bytes, that is binary digits, assigned to convey specific information inside a given format.)
Post-press data standards emerge
A microphone picks up the individual's speech that is in analog or wave form, and the speech waves are broken down into patterns of binary digits by a digital signal processor to represent the vocal sounds of human speech.
Voice recognition technology for persons who have motoric disabilities
One full adder is accountable for the addition of two binary digits at any phase of the ripple carry.
High efficient carry skip adder in various multiplier structures
Data on a computer is stored as 0s and 1s, in what are known as binary digits or bits.
The Age Of Atomic Storage
We translate all kinds of information into "optimally compressed bits." This implies two steps: the translation of information 1) into binary digits of hardware capacity, and then 2) into optimally compressed bits.
How to measure the world's technological capacity to communicate, store, and compute information Part II: measurement unit and conclusions
Subjects include spoken numbers, playing cards, dates, abstract images, binary digits, random words, names and faces.
Memory wizards set for Festival of the Mind contest
Instead of being transmitted "raw", the signal is turned into a series of ones and zeros - binary digits or bits for short, before being broadcast.
Dial turns once again in a radio revolution; Technology Correspondent Kurt Jacobs looks at the launch of digital rad io in Birmingham
It digitizes the subscriber's account information and voice and turns them into a high-speed stream of binary digits. A telephone using TDMA technology transmits its digitized information only during an assigned time slot a mere several thousandths of a second long.
Telecommunications fraud
After selection of significant DCT, Huffman encoding is performed to convert coefficients into binary digits.
Color feature based image compression

Encyclopedia browser ?
Full browser ?