Byte Byte The byte is a unit of digital information that most commonly consists of eight bits, representing a binary number. Historically, the byte was the number of bits used to encode a single character of text in a computer and for this reason it is the smallest addressable unit of memory in many computer architectures. The size of the byte has historically been hardware dependent and no definitive standards existed that mandated the size – byte-sizes from 1 to 48 bits are known to have been used in the past. Early character encoding systems often used six bits, and machines
Stochastic computing Stochastic computing Stochastic computing is a collection of techniques that represent continuous values by streams of random bits. Complex computations can then be computed by simple bit-wise operations on the streams. Stochastic computing is distinct from the study of randomized algorithms. Suppose that formula_1 is given, and we wish to compute formula_2. Stochastic computing performs this operation using probability instead of arithmetic. Specifically, suppose that there are two random, independent bit streams called "stochastic number"s (i.e. Bernoulli processes), where the probability of a one in the first stream is formula_3, and the probability in the second stream is formula_4. We