> Computers use base two because their most natural unit can occupy one of a couple states Not really. That's just the way things worked out, mainly due to how

> Computers use base two because their most natural unit can occupy one of a couple states Not really. That's just the way things worked out, mainly due to how electronics (transistors) work, and with the miniaturization of electronics. Babbages Analytical Engine was designed as a base-10 machine, mainly because this was the most efficient way to represent things using gears (and with all the friction that entails especially with large numbers - lot's of ingenious mechanism was designed by him to work around this limitation). Even ENIAC, which used vacuum tubes, was base-10; this had to do with a number of reasons (reliability of vacuum tubes, war rationing issues possibly - at least when it was designed; there are probably other reasons as well). Other bases have also been tried, but base-2 is default mainly because its easy to create simple circuits (especially miniaturized) to represent such states, and replicate/connect them efficiently (essentially, once you have a NAND or NOR gate represented, with transistors or anything else, you have the basic building block for the rest of a computer). Other than that, there isn't anything particularly unique in regards to binary representation (base-2) for computation versus other bases.