Google doodle celebrates George Boole’s 200th birthday with a crash course in logic gates

By Rehan Ahmed ⏐ 10 years ago ⏐

3 min read

It’s George Boole’s 200th Birthday, and our favorite doodlers at Google are commemorating it with a brilliant yet geeky little show of the four basic logic gates at “Google.com”.

George Boole was an incredible mathematician, philosopher and logician but is specifically known around the computer world for his invention of Boolean Logic; the basis of the development of the “Logic Gates”. These Logic Gates are responsible for creating the basic system on which computers function! Today, the search-giant Google decided to celebrate Boole’s birthday in a geeky fun little way by employing the techniques of the Logic Gates to illuminate different alphabets of the colorful Google logo.

Simply head over to the Google.com or see the new Google doodle below that can give you a crash course in logic gates or a good laugh to your geeky heart, depending on whether you are a computer-geek or not.

Explaining The Google Doodle!

Don’t know about the logic gates? Wondering what is really going on with all those X’s and Y’s and all those And’s, Or’s, or even X combined with Or’s? XOR? Well, here’s a small explanation…

The Logic Gates basically define if a condition is true or not. A computer works on the principle of electric switches, which have only two possible outcomes: On or Off! Or a 1 or a 0. So, we can use these outcomes with the help of some logical Operators(known as Logic Gates)!

AND: AND means that if you have two electric switches(A and B), it will only give you a value of True if both the A and B have values of “1”. Otherwise, if both are 0 or A is zero or B is 0, it will simply return False. As a result, the only value for which AND operator returns a True is if both the values are 1.
OR: OR means that as long as you have one electric switch with the value “1”, it will return the value True. So the only condition in which it will return a false is if both the electric switches have a 0 value.
NOT: NOT simply reverses the output. NOT A means that if A has a value of 0, the outcome will be 1, and vice versa. NOT can be combined with AND or OR gates to create NAND or NOR gates, which simply invert the end output.

XOR is another slightly more complicated logical operator which will return a True value, if only one of the electric switches is 1. Otherwise, if both are 0 or both are 1, it will result a False output.

If you have managed to grasp the concept through my humble attempt to share some computer knowledge about logic gates, you can see in the Google logo as how a true output of the logical gates illuminates an alphabet. Note that the visibility of x and y determines if they are a 1(visible) or a 0(invisible).