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 stochastic computing is robust against noise; if a few bits in a stream are flipped, those errors will have no significant impact on the solution. Furthermore, stochastic computing elements can tolerate skew in the arrival time of the inputs. Circuits work properly even when the inputs are misaligned temporally. As a result, stochastic systems can be designed to work with inexpensive locally generated clocks instead of using a global clock and an expensive clock distribution network. Finally, stochastic computing provides an estimate of the solution that grows more accurate as we extend the bit stream. In particular, it provides a