Byte explicitly denotes a sequence of eight bits, eliminating the ambiguity of the byte. The term "byte" was coined by Werner Buchholz in June 1956, during the early design phase for the IBM Stretch computer, which had addressing to the bit and variable field length (VFL) instructions with a byte size encoded in the instruction. It is a deliberate respelling of "bite" to avoid accidental mutation to "bit". Another origin of "byte" for bit groups smaller than a machine's word size (and in particular groups of four bits) is on record by Louis G. Dooley, who claimed he coined the term
Stochastic computing can take the logical AND of the two streams. The probability of a one in the output stream is formula_5. By observing enough output bits and measuring the frequency of ones, it is possible to estimate formula_5 to arbitrary accuracy. The operation above converts a fairly complicated computation (multiplication of formula_3 and formula_4) into a series of very simple operations (evaluation of formula_9) on random bits. More generally speaking, stochastic computing represents numbers as streams of random bits and reconstructs numbers by calculating frequencies. The computations are performed on the streams and translate complicated operations on formula_3 and formula_4 into