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
Quantum computing measurement, collapsing the system of qubits into one of the formula_2 eigenstates, where each qubit is zero or one, decomposing into a classical state. The outcome can, therefore, be at most formula_1 classical bits of information (or, if the algorithm did not end with a measurement, the result is an unobserved quantum state). Quantum algorithms are often probabilistic, in that they provide the correct solution only with a certain known probability. Note that the term non-deterministic computing must not be used in that case to mean probabilistic (computing) because the term non-deterministic has a different meaning in computer science. An