What exactly are computers?

Computers are mysterious devices that allow you to browse the internet, play games, and be more productive in your daily lives. Chances are, you have used a computer at least once in your life, but believe it or not, but computers are not all that complicated. They are simply a series of switches that can either be set to on (1) or off (0). They then perform operations like addition, subtraction, multiplication, and division to calculate things, like your taxes. It stores numbers and letters in binary code, a series of 1's and 0's. Using this special type of math, called Base 2, allows you to convert any number to binary.

The field of computer science is very broad, the few that I want to highlight today are Networking, Security, Artificial Intelligence, and Software Development. Let's start with Networking. Networking is the branch of computer science that deals with connecting computers from around the world into this large collection of information called the internet. The following picture gives a glimpse into how a computer communicates with the internet.

Let's move on to Security now, because by exposing your computer to the internet means it is vulnerable to attacks from an outside source. In order to keep your information secure on the internet, we use encryption. Which is a fancy word for the process in which the signals you send/receive are jumbled up and unreadable until you decrypt them. To do this, your computer comes up with a private key at random, using this key it jumbles up the signal, and sends it into the internet. Encryption doesn't mean that your information cannot be intercepted, it just makes the person intercepting it unable to read it. The following picture gives an accurate representation of the process of encryption.

Next we have Artificial Intelligence, or AI. AI is the study of getting a computer to "think" on its own. If you have seen the movie The Terminator, skynet is an AI that became self aware. We are a long ways off from having our own skynet, but AI's are making some progress. AI's were first developed in the mid 1960's, and have found their way to becoming used fairly often. AI's are most notably used in video games to act as the opposition to most human players.

Finally, we have Software Development. None of the above would be possible without it, and it's what I ultimately plan to get a job in after college. Software Development is the process of writing code to make computers to perform certain tasks. There are a lot of different languages that programmers use, and a few of the more popular ones are C#, Java, C, and Python. These languages convert a syntax, which is a strict way of writing a sentence, into binary code so computers can process it. The programmers spend long hours at keyboards developing anything from word processing programs to video games, and nothing on computers would be possible without them.