What is the minimum number of bits that are needed to store letters from English alphabet without capitals?

Every time a character is typed on a keyboard a code number is transmitted to the computer.
The code numbers are stored in binary on computers as Character Sets called ASCII.
The table below shows a version of ASCII that uses 7 bits to code each character. The biggest number that can be held in 7-bits is 1111111 in binary (127 in decimal). Therefore 128 different characters can be represented in the ASCII character set (Using codes 0 to 127). More than enough to cover all of the characters on a standard English-Language keyboard.
Click here for the full ASCII table.

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How many bits do you need to store the alphabet?
What is the minimum number of bits required to encode all upper letters in English?
How do you find the minimum number of bits?
How many bits does it take to represent a letter?

"Originally based on the English alphabet, ASCII encodes 128 specified characters into 7-bit binary integers as shown by the ASCII chart above.The characters encoded are numbers 0 to 9, lowercase letters a to z, uppercase letters A to Z, basic punctuation symbols, control codes that originated with Teletype machines, and a space. For example, lowercase j would become binary 1101010 and decimal 106. ASCII includes definitions for 128 characters: 33 are non-printing control characters (many now obsolete)that affect how text and space are processed and 95 printable characters, including the space." – from wikipedia

The ASCII has been used for a long time. But it has some serious shortcomings:
1. It only uses English alphabets.
2. It is limited to 7-bits, so it can only represent 128 distinct characters.
3. It is not usable for non-latin languages, such as Chinese.
Character form of a decimal digit In ASCII, the number character is not the same as the actual number value. For example, the ASCII value 011 0100 will print the character '4', the binary value is actually equal to the decimal number 52. Therefore ASCII cannot be used for arithmetic.

1a. What is the minimum number of bits that are required to uniquely represent the characters of English alphabet? (Consider upper case characters alone)

The number of unique bit patterns using i bits is 2i We need at least 26 unique bit patterns. The cleanest approach is to compute log2 26 and take the ceiling .This yields 5 as the answer. Trial and error is also an acceptable solution.

1b. how many more characters can be uniquely represented without requiring additional bits?

With 5 bits, we can represent up to 32 (25) unique bit patterns; we can represent

32 - 26 = 6 more characters without requiring additional bits.

2 Using 7 bits to represent each number, write the representations of 23 and -23 in signed

Magnitude and 2's complement integers.

Signed Magnitude

1's Complement

2's Complement

0010111

-23

1010111

1101000

1101001

Answer & Explanation

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How many bits do you need to store the alphabet?

If we want to represent one character from the 26-letter Roman alphabet (A-Z), then we need log2(26) = 4.7 bits.

What is the minimum number of bits required to encode all upper letters in English?

there's 26 uppercase characters and 10 digits, total 36 so you need at least 6 bits to encode all of them. The ascii code uses 7 bits to encode also punctuation characters, lowercase letters and a few control characters.

How do you find the minimum number of bits?

Simple Approach:.

Find binary representation of the number using simple decimal to binary representation technique..

Count number of set bits in the binary representation equal to 'n'..

Create a binary representation with it's 'n' least significant bits set to 1..

Convert the binary representation back to the number..

How many bits does it take to represent a letter?

ASCII is an 8-bit code. That is, it uses eight bits to represent a letter or a punctuation mark. Eight bits are called a byte. A binary code with eight digits, such as 1101 10112, can be stored in one byte of computer memory.