As you know, computers internally work only with ones and zeros, and everything is represented in some way using these “bits.” Using M bits you can encode 2M different values. Let’s say you’re interested in encoding the signed integers …, -1, 0, 1, 2, …. To make things simple, let’s use a fixed number of bits: for example with 8 bits you can encode 28 = 256 different numbers. One of the numbers is zero, so you are left with 255 bit patterns to be divided between positive and neg...
