2.5: Crossing the boundary

So computers are used to acquire, store and present, exchange, and manipulate interesting characteristics of the world. But this raises a serious problem: the world we inhabit and know so well and the world inside the computer are very different in kind. We live in an analogue world. The world of the computer is digital. The exact meaning of these terms may not be very clear to you at the moment. I will define them both in the next section. For the moment, the only point I want to make is that in order to capture pieces of reality on a computer, you have to move them from an analogue to a digital world inside the computer. In other words, you have to cross the boundary between two very different territories.

In I look at the nature of the analogue and digital worlds, while how we can transport aspects of our world across the boundary into the digital world is discussed in .