Question

ASCII (American Standard Code for Information Interchange) has an encoding for every character of the alphabet, and every number and special character, for a total of 256 possible values. So, here is a bit of a trick question: How many bits are required to store the text of the number "2903" in ASCII?

What is the minimum number of bits you need to encode the 26 letters of the alphabet, the 10 digits, and a space?

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Answer 1

since there are 256 ASCII they can be represented using 8 bits //since 2^8 is 256
now using these 8 bits every ASCII character is represented including numbers //individual digits
now for 2903
since there are 4 different numbers// each number needs 8 bits in ascii
so, to represent 2903 in ASCII: 4*8 = 32 bits needed

What is the minimum number of bits you need to encode the 26 letters of the alphabet, the 10 digits, and a space?
total unique values are : 26+10+1 = 37
to encode 37 values we need at least 6 bits, //2^6 = 64