7.1. Zeros and Ones
Yet now and then your Men of WitWill condescend to take a Bit.
— JONATHAN SWIFT, Cadenus and Vanessa (1713)
If the base 2 is used the resulting units may be called binary digits,or more briefly bits, a word suggested by J. W. Tukey.
— CLAUDE E. SHANNON, in The Bell System Technical Journal (1948)
bit (bit), n . . . [A] boring tool . . .
— Random House Dictionary of the English Language (1987)
COMBINATORIAL ALGORITHMS often require special attention to efficiency, and the proper representation of data is an important way to gain the necessary speed. It is therefore wise to beef up our knowledge of elementary representation techniques before we set out to study combinatorial algorithms in detail.
Most of today’s computers are ...
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