ENG 2003: INFORMATION TECHNOLOGY

Tutorial 1: Numbering Systems and Data Representation in Computers

1. Write the first 10 decimal numbers as 8-bit binary numbers.

0000 0000 (0)

0000 0001 (1)
0000 0010 (2)
0000 0011 (3)
0000 0100 (4)
0000 0101 (5)
0000 0110 (6)
0000 0111 (7)
0000 1000 (8)
0000 1001 (9)

2. Convert the following decimal numbers to 8-bit binary.

a. 26
0001 1010
b. 42
0010 1010
c. 194
1100 0010
d. 245
1111 0101

3. Convert the following 8-bit binary numbers to decimal.

a. 0111 1111
127
b. 1011 1101
189
c. 1001 1010
154
d. 0100 0100
68

4. The English alphabet consists of 52 letters (upper case and lower case), 10 digits and about 20 other
symbols. These 82 symbols can be encoded with 7 bits.

How many bits are required to encode 10 symbols, 200 symbols, and 60,000 symbols, respectively?

4 bits, 8 bits, and 16 bits, respectively.

5. If a page of text consists of an average of 60 lines and each line has an average of 85 characters, how
many pages of text can be stored in 1 Mebibyte? 1 Gibibyte? Assume that 8-bit ASCII is adopted.

Each page contains 5100 bytes (60×85)

The number of pages can be stored in

1 Mebibyte: 1×1024×1024/5100 = 205
1 Gibibyte: 1×1024×1024 ×1024/5100 = 210,537
6. How many bits are in 20MB? 20GiB?

20MB = 20×1000×1000 ×8= 160,000,000 bits

20GiB = 20×1024×1024 ×1024 ×8 = 171,798,691,840 bits.

7. A remote database contains one minute of color motion-video. The video sequence has a resolution of
1280×1024 pixels, a color depth of 24 bits, and a frame rate of 30 frames per second. This motion-video
is transmitted via a communication channel with a capacity of 100Mbits/s.

a. Calculate the storage requirements in Mebibytes for this motion-video.

b. Does the required motion video transfer rate exceed the communication channel capacity? If this is
true, explain how to resolve the problem by fine-tuning the video.

(a) Storage requirements in bytes for this motion-video per frame

= 1280102424/8 bytes
= 3,932,160 bytes

Storage requirements in Mebibytes for this motion-video

= 3,932,1603060(1/1024)(1/1024) Mebibytes
= 6,750 Mebibytes

(b) Required transfer rate for this motion-video

= 6,750 Mebibytes 8 / 60
= 900 Mebibits/s
= 900 10242 / 10002 Megabits/s
= 943.7184 Megabits/s
> 100 Megabits/s

Since the required transfer rate of motion video exceeds the communication channel capacity, the data
rate of the video can be reduced by
i) Reducing color depth (may result in color distortion)
ii) Reducing frame per second (may result in choppy motion), and/or
iii) Reducing resolution (may result in poor visual quality).