The answers that are included here are sample answers only. There might be many other answers to a given problem that would also receive full credit. See the home page for the text, The Most Complex Machine , for more information about the course. Explain what is meant by computation .
Computation is the mechanical manipulation of symbols.
Although the results of a computation can be meaningful, the process of computation doesn't depend on the meaning. The fact that computation is meaningless in itself explains why it can be done by a machine. The fact that computations can have meaningful results is what makes computing machines so useful. Each bit doubles the number of possibilities. The number of possibilites with 16 bits is 2 multiplied by itself 16 times.