introduction post

[PabloDons]

binary is pretty simple. in really really short it is counting with just 1's and 0's.
in school you have probably learned that there are 10 different symbols: 0, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8 and 9.
let's say we have 4 bits: 0000. this is, as you might have guessed, 0.
counting up one we get 0001. as you might have already known from basic counting in school, zeros to the left of the number means nothing and can be removed to simplify. but in a computer you cannot remove them so we keep them.
now usually what comes next is a 2, but we only have 0's and 1's. Now what comes after a 9? 10!
counting up again we get 0010. we have only counted twice so that is a 2 in binary.
then so on and so forth.
the first bit is the one that has the smallest value, or in other words, the least significant bit.
that bit has the value 1 in our case. now going up the next bit has the value 2 or in binary a 10. the next has the value 4 or in binary 100. you can calculate the bit value with the formula 2^n where n is the bit number.

the reason people use binary instead of decimal is because redstone wire has 2 states: on or off (or with other words 1 or 0). you can use hexadecimal (base 16) because signal strength can have 16 different values. but that is using comparators