"The machine doesn't see Herc the way you or I see him. The machine sees Herc as a series of ones and zeroes..."
Computers in fiction are frequently portrayed at exchanging information or communicating mainly in binary, i.e., in zeroes and ones. This is because Real Life computers use binary information in their internal processing, and authors then apply this well-known fact to depict how computers in general operate.
Compare with Expospeak. Subtrope of Speaks in Binary.
Examples:
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Anime & Manga
- Described as the foundation of the Digimon World in Digimon V-Tamer 01 and something of an arc number. Besides showing up in the title, Taichi and Zero symbolically represent the numbers with Taichi's name including "ichi", meaning "one", and Zero being Self Explanatory. It's first brought up in-story by Lord HolyAngemon when Taichi and Zero explain their combination and 100% win record to him. The guardian of the Net Ocean and the Jijimon from Hospitown can analyze and make sense of any given object's 0-1 arrangement, Demon can manipulate the arrangements to inconsistent degrees, Arkadimon breaks them apart then eats them and so on.
- Seen at end of Digimon Adventure: After being "deleted" by Apocalymon, the Digidestined are in a blank world (possibly the recycling bin of the Digital World) where the only data there are zeroes and ones.
- In Digimon Tamers, a lot of computer code is shown in binary but this is fact a subversion; what is shown is either ASCII (which is so ancient even Yamaki finds it insulting it is being used as a direct means of communication), or it was actually directly written in machine language (from a programmer that started in the 80's).
Comic Books
- Artificial intelligences and robots in the Marvel Universe are generally depicted vocalizing binary code when subject to major damage or critical system failure.
Comic Strips
- Wally from Dilbert invoked this when he was accused of abusing the company Internet to look at porn. He responded that all he downloaded was a series of harmless zeroes and ones — the people at IT who intercepted his traffic were the ones who "activated" those zeroes and ones and turned them into naughty pictures, so they should be fired. Needless to say, nobody was fooled.
- Another Dilbert
had an old programmer, Dilbert and Wally sitting at the lunch table. The man says, "When I started programming, we didn't have any of these sissy 'icons' and 'windows.' All we had were zeros and ones — and sometimes we didn't even have ones. I wrote an entire database program using only zeros." Dilbert replies, "You had zeros? We had to use the letter 'O.'"
- Another Dilbert
- An old FoxTrot strip had Jason and his friend discuss various sites and referring to them by their IP adresses rather than proper DNS (Domain Name Space). This is treated as them being exceptionally computer-savvy, yet also obnoxious and needlessly overcomplicating.
Fan Works
- Pops up in Sword Art Online Abridged when Kirito tries to explain to Asuna why they can't literally split the Badass Longcoat that dropped from a boss they just beat.
Kirito: It's not fabric I can cut, it's a bunch of ones and zeroes.
Asuna: Fine, then give me the ones.
Kirito: Fuck you, I want the ones!
Films — Animation
- One of the better scenes in Battle for Terra is Mala talking Giddy into helping the Tarren forces by explaining the logic of his own orders to him.
Films — Live-Action
- Rat in The Core has the memorable quote: "How many languages do you speak? I speak one: 10100. With that I could steal your money, your secrets, your sexual fantasies, your whole life. In any country, any time, any place I want. We multitask like you breathe. I couldn't think as slow as you if I tried." Possibly justified as an intentionally dumbed-down Badass Boast, but you don't want to start trying to justify The Core.
- Ready Player One: Naturally for a movie where a big chunk of the action happen in Cyberspace, this imagery comes up. Especially with Innovative Online Industries, which acronym "IOI" is used everywhere, styled as to look like "101", and melded into blocks of zeroes and ones in their advertisements/communications.
- Droids and other robots in the Star Wars universe speak "Binary," which is a series of beeps and boops. It's the whole reason why Luke needed C-P30 in the first place: R2-D2 only speaks Binary and Luke needed a translator.
- TRON has the Bit, who acted as a sidekick to the hero and could only say "yes" or "no" (with a corresponding shape-change). Though technically It also assumes a neutral state when not responding to a question, which should qualify it as a trit.
- On the other hand, given advances in modern computing, it could also be considered a qubit (quantum bit), and its resting state is simply a superposition of its 1 and 0 states.
Literature
- Neal Stephenson's Snow Crash has the similar mind-control system to "Whackets". A specifically crafted image can crash the brains of humans, but since the image is black and white and based on binary, it only works on computer programmers (as they have knowledge of binary ingrained into their brain).
- Likewise, the short story Von Goon's Gambit tells the tale of a chess player who discovers a certain arrangement of chess pieces creates an alternating pattern of light and dark which constitutes a computer program that crashes the human mind. He becomes world champion by default (having driven all challengers mad) before he's lynched by a gang of respectable chess masters who've decided that what they really can't stand is a smart-ass.
- Dave Barry in Cyberspace claims that the binary system which computers use has "only two numbers, 0 and 1," which renders them incapable of saying, "Two, four, six, eight! Who do we appreciate?" The alternative cheer computers have to use, "One, zero! Who's our hero?" is, in his view, "why, although computers are getting really good at chess, they still suck at football."
- In Unlimited Fafnir, Atlantis was under attack from a being that could shut down electronic technology, so they carved the binary of their civilization's administrative program into stone tablets in an attempt to salvage their technology. In modern times, NIFL managed to recover these tablets and reproduce a lesser version of the program.
Live-Action TV
- Max Headroom: "Whackets" actually has a mind-control system that worked by flashing a series of zeroes and ones at the human viewer. Max himself proves exceptionally vulnerable, as he is inherently based on, you guessed it, zeroes and ones.
- The Murder, She Wrote episode "A Virtual Murder" used the same concept as the TNG episode below, only instead of computer-like aliens, it's apparently regular human computer programmers who think like this. "One or zero", the murderer says at the end, "I swore a long time ago I'd never live in that grey world in between. It's got to be all, or nothing!"
- Joe on NewsRadio once claimed to be able to read binary. In one episode, he reads Dave's letter on his computer, which had broken and was only showing things in binary format.
- Red Dwarf: Spoofed by Kryten, who occasionally says proverbs in his "native" tongue.
- Star Trek: The Next Generation did a first-season episode in which the computer-like Bynars race steals the Enterprise to save their homeworld. At the end, they claim that they didn't just ask because "You might have said no". Riker concludes that, as the Binars think like computers, it all comes down to zeroes and ones to them: yes vs. no, take the ship vs. don't take the ship. And if you think this metaphor doesn't make sense, that's because the plot of this episode wasn't very good. The title of said episode is "11001001", of course.
- In the Stargate Atlantis episode "The Intruder", the computer monitor behind Hermiod displayed The Matrix-style scrolling columns... consisting entirely of the digits "0" and "1". You'd think the United States military would build something more sensible than that, given their supposed fondness of viewer-friendly interfaces. It's worse than that, after staring at the scrolling numbers for a few seconds McKay immediately deduced that he was looking at a virus. He then went on to press a few buttons and translate the binary into Wraith, somehow confirming that the Wraith must have been the ones to write it.
- Referenced in Kamen Rider Zero-One, as the main character adopts the codename of "Zero-One" in a series that deals with the concept of artificial intelligence. Zeroes and Ones are occasionally also seen as a visual representation of data being transferred in cyberspace.
- Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D.: Season 4 introduces the Darkhold, a Tome of Eldritch Lore whose pages always adapt to the language that the current reader is most familiar with. So, in "Deals with Our Devils", when Aida, who is an AI in an artificial body reads the book, the pages appear to her as written in binary code.
Music
- In the song "Fibonacci Sequence" by the net-famous musician Doctor Steel. "All our gods and heroes / are only ones and zeroes."
- Referenced/spoofed in the Flight of the Conchords song "The Humans are Dead". It contains a "binary solo," which consists of Bret reciting sequences of ones and zeros out loud.
- "Brothers of the Creed" by Miracle of Sound. "Zeroes and ones I bleed, we're brothers of the Creed."
- "And all we ever were, just zeroes and ones" from "Zero-Sum" by Nine Inch Nails.
- The trope name itself is the very last line in Rilo Kiley's "Science vs. Romance".
- "The Body Electric" by Rush: "One zero zero, one zero zero, one, SOS. One zero zero, one zero zero, one, in distress!"note
Radio
- Used by comedian Rufus Hound about Brian Cox in the "Dinosaurs" episode of The Infinite Monkey Cage:
Rufus: The Brian Cox pitch, ultimately, is "Wow! Look at that!" And when you do it you're talking about, you know, red dwarfs and event horizons, and so your "Wow!" exists as a series of ones and zeroes that are rolling in your almost human head. But for normal people, we only really get that when we can touch it, or lick it.
Tabletop Games
- Mage: The Ascension had Virtual Adepts' trinary decks. They were described as the next step in the technomagic "In a stiff computer world of "yes" or "no", trinary decks are able to say "Well... maybe".". Which is, of course, totally absurd to anyone who has used a computer and noticed that it can deal with, for instance, more than two colors.
- Warhammer 40,000: The language spoken by the machine-worshipping Adeptus Mechanicus is called Binary and is utterly incomprehensible to regular humans. The Inquisition is less than happy at this state of affairs, the Ordo Logos is trying to make some sense of it but have yet to make any progress.
Video Games
- The first set of .hack games has one character expressing:
Mia: The World note is made of more than ones and zeros; there are more options than "yes" and "no".
- Alluded to in Marathon 2: Durandal, by an A.I. describing another A.I.:
Durandal: Do you remember the days when computers were simple, unreasoning things you could turn off and on like flashlights? [...] [Thoth] concerns himself with the states of off and on, good and evil...
- Angus in Night in the Woods brings this up, but goes on to say the universe is made of atoms and our perceptions of reality are chemical reactions—meaning that everything can be simplified to the point of erasing all meaning.
- Twelve's win quotes in Street Fighter III are in binary format, representing numbers, which themselves correspond to the matching letter of the alphabet. "01011.01111" becomes "11.15", which becomes "KO" in practice.
- The video game sequel to TRON, TRON 2.0 introduced Byte: although Jet initially thinks he's a Bit, Byte gets indignant and says that he's eight times smarter than any simple Bit. Ironically, this statement betrays the comprehension gap that leads to this trope: a byte is composed of eight bits, but has eight orders of magnitude greater capacity. If Byte played by the same rules as Bit, he'd be able to say 256 distinct things.
Toys
- Computer Engineer Barbie's laptop has "Barbie" spelled out in binary-encoded ASCII.
Web Animation
- A Strong Bad Email segment has Strong Bad spout a list of zeroes and ones in a robotic voice and then claim he was "speaking technology". To be fair, Strong Bad's knowledge of technology is stuck in the eighties.
Web Comics
- Narbonic has this strip, in which Helen (normally a biologist) has been infected with computer geekdom.
- One of the notes frequently accompanying Schlock Mercenary comics mentioned that the creation of thinking A.I. was made possible by the evolution from the "binary digit" into the "trinary digit", allowing computers to think in terms of "yes", "no", and "maybe". (On a side note, it is also mentioned that the same logic that turned "binary digit" into "bit" also turned "trinary digit" into "tit", further discouraging females from pursuing a career in programming.)
- In Real Life, the trinary base unit is called a "trit". Possibly for that very reason. Base four and five units, however, would probably be "quits" and "pits".
- This is a pretty egregious mistake, especially considering that the artist worked for Novell.
- The concept of possibility is handled not through adding a new logical value, but treating true/false as a continuum as opposed to a binary selection, allowing for values that fall between 0 and 1.
- Trinary logic systems do exist, and are most notably used in databases. The third value, though, is not "maybe". but indeterminate, a.k.a. "I don't know."
Western Animation
- In the Adventure Time episode "Guardians of Sunshine", when Finn and Jake teleport into the video game, Finn is mesmerized by his leg being made up of numbers.
Finn: My leg is math!
- The Batman: In "Artifacts", roughly a thousand years after Batman's time, people find the Batcave and try to find clues on how to defeat the immortal Mr. Freeze. Batman's computer has degraded beyond use, but they discover binary code etched into the titanium walls, that when translated becomes all of Batman's data.
- In Code Lyoko, zeroes and ones are constantly filling up blue squares inside the Lyoko Towers, within the tunnels between the sectors, or over the surface of the Celestial Dome in Sector 5.
- In one Family Guy episode a professor demonstrated the concept of binary language via a scene from The Miracle Worker done in zeroes and ones. Anne Sullivan tries to teach deaf and blind Helen Keller to say "water".
Annie Sullivan: Zero one, one zero, one zero, zero one.
Helen Keller: [incomprehensible gibberish]
Annie Sullivan: Zero one, one zero, one zero, zero one!
Helen Keller: [garbled repetition of binary phrase]
Annie Sullivan: Zero one! Zero one! - Similarly spoofed by Bender in Futurama.
- "Hell Is Other Robots" has Bender giving a Robotology prayer in all zeroes and ones (though, oddly enough, it ends with "2").
- "The Honking" has the sequence "0101100101" (357 written in binary with an unnecessary leading zero) appear on a wall, which Bender dismisses as "gibberish". He then immediately notices the sequence reflected in a mirror: "1010011010" ("666" written in binary) and freaks out.
- And in "A Head in the Polls", he has a dream that turns into a nightmare when Bender thinks he saw a 2 (incidentally, there is one in the flash of 1s and 0s of his dream; it's visible just at the bottom as it ends). Fry comforts him: "There's no such thing as 2."
- In Bender's Big Score, it's revealed that the entire universe and time itself runs on zeroes and ones. Even money says it's a series of tubes, too.
- The binary number on the door of Bender's apartment is the ASCII value of the dollar sign.
- Prayers and ominous messages aside, Bender isn't actually fluent in binary, he just knows how to ask where the bathroom is.
- ReBoot has an entire race of people, called Binomes, which are anthropomorphic zeroes and ones. Beyond that, there are a few times when characters count in binary. Those infected by the super-virus Daemon count backwards in binary prior to deletion. Age is apparently recorded in a binary fashion, a character once said another character's age should be one-one, while earlier, Enzo's clothes change from reading 01 to 10 during his birthday. In one episode, a binome tells a joke in ones and zeroes, which, in this case, is actually a roundabout substitution cipher: if you translate the ones and zeroes into decimal numbers, then the decimal numbers into letters, it becomes "Take my wife, please!"
Real Life
- Encoding some things in Binary, such as numbers, does create certain limitations that wouldn't otherwise exist. The common standard binary floating point format, for instance, cannot exactly encode "1/10" as 0.1 is actually a repeating numeral (the same way you cannot exactly write "1/3" in decimal: you have to either round up or round down or spend the rest of your life writing threes). There are other ways of encoding numbers into binary that can precisely handle fractions, and even irrational numbers, but calculations with these methods are much slower than calculations using floating point approximations.
- The zip code for New York City's PBS station is 10101. Fitting, considering that the folks there are geeky enough to notice and appreciate that.
- Related to the fact of binary computer chips, it is commonly stated that there is only "one" or "zero," depending upon the voltage of the signal. However, if the voltage source is disconnected, it can't be either one OR zero, and is in what is called a "Mu State."
- Also, high-impedance (effectively, a signal that is not there).
- Or a "don't care" value.
- Also, high-impedance
- Quantum computers are computers that don't use just zeros and ones. Lo and behold they're more (asymptotically)note powerful than classical computers, or rather they might be if we can make them bigger than a few atoms in size. The fundamental unit of quantum computing is the qubit, which can be in a superposition of zero and one. To give an idea of how strange this is, it has been proven that the fastest way for a computer to search an unsorted database is for it to search each individual record, taking n time to search n records. A quantum computer can search the same database of n items in square root(n) time.
- To be a bit more clear, a quantum computer cannot do anything that a normal computer can't do, it can just do some things much faster. Quantum computers also aren't deterministic, which means that they have a (hopefully) small chance of actually returning a wrong answer. For these reasons practical implementations of quantum computers will almost certainly be paired with ordinary computers.
- The Soviets built a ternary computer, or a computer with 3 states. But in this case, it's not 0, 1, and 2, but rather -1, 0, and 1. There are some practical applications, but binary took off and the Soviets needed something compatible with the rest of the world.
- The transmission of electrical impulses in neurons follows the all-or-none principle, meaning it can only have two states. Meaning in a way we also work in zeroes and ones.
- From the time of the 2nd Intifada, there was a book about Israeli and Arab cyber-ruffians, attacking Arab/Israeli websites, called "From Sticks and Stones to Zeros and Ones".
- Many early computers used analog rather than digital values, completely averting this in real life. Analog computers still see some uses, but have major limitations for general purpose computing compared to digital (chief among them being that analog computations are neither exact nor reproducible: they can give results that are good enough, but never absolutely perfect; further, reprogramming one typically involves altering the hardware).
- Back in the golden age of Mainframes and Minicomputers, a standard piece of any sizable computer installation was a front panel console with a lot of lamps or LEDs to show the on-off state of individual processor signals in real time. This display was accompanied by at least one set of toggle switches for the operator to input memory addresses and data in binary code, which was often vital to starting a computer after powering it on. (Fully automatic booting didn't become a standard and ubiquitous feature until the 1970s, due largely to advances in read-only memory technology.) A few early hobbyist-oriented microcomputers, most famously the MITS Altair 8800, were designed around similar front panels.
- Practically all communication speeds are given as bits-per-second rather than bytes-per-second. While a lot of people think this is marketing fluff to make the communication channel sound more impressive, a lot of communication protocols use extra bits for things that aren't related to carrying data. These extra bits could be thought of as computers literally signaling to each other in their own language and provides no benefit to the human using the computer.
