Today we will examine how computers make decisions at the hardware level by studying logic gates. The big idea is that every digital system—from adders and ALUs to CPUs and GPUs—reduces computation to millions of extremely fast true/false evaluations. Gates implement Boolean operators in silicon, allowing voltage levels to be treated as binary 1s and 0s. You should  be able to describe their purpose, explain how they are used inside real computer systems, and recognize how they form the foundation of binary computing.

At this stage, you should be thinking about gates not only as truth tables, but as physical implementations built from transistors that either conduct or block current to produce a valid binary output. Understanding this prepares you for later work with circuits, Boolean simplification, CPU design, and low-level programming.

Questions for Reflection and Review

1. Describe the purpose of logic gates in a digital system. What problem do they solve at the hardware level?

2. Explain how combining multiple gates can create more complex computational structures (e.g., adders or comparators).

3. Distinguish between XOR and XNOR by describing a real-world situation each could model.

Please use this tool for our in-class work: https://truthtabletools.com/gates/ (backup here)