human
I've been hearing a lot of talk lately about the Y2K problem. What is the Y2K problem and why is it so important?
assistant
The Y2K problem refers to the potential for computer systems to malfunction on January 1, 2000 due to the fact that computers store numbers in binary format, which means they use only two digits to represent each number. For example, if you wanted to write down the number 123 in binary, you would need three digits (1, 2, 3). If you wrote these digits out as base-10 numbers, then converted them back into binary, you would end up with something like 01111011. This is because there are not enough digits available to represent all possible values.