So it's
2076.
America has elected its first robot president,
Presidential Droid X34. The first order of business? Changing every document to binary-coded
ASCII, to make it easier on the eyes of America's
robot citizens. That's bad news for you though, because you're a human who probably can't read binary-coded ASCII.
Do you really want to be illiterate in the future?
Well... that's pretty unlikely, and we'll probably all be dead by then anyway. In honesty, learning this serves little to no purpose and probably won't help you accomplish anything in the future. If you don't mind wasting some time to pick up a useless skill, read on.
Before we start, it's vital that you know how to convert binary to decimal, you can learn that here. Once you've learned that, you also need to be able to pull the nth letter of the alphabet off the top of your head quickly. What's the 16th letter of the alphabet? You don't know, do you? Shame on you.
An easy way to do this is to remember the following:
e = 5
j = 10
o = 15
t = 20
Then to find the 16th letter, it's the letter after o, which is p. It takes a little practice, but you can master with some patience and effort.
Now on to the good stuff. Let's try to convert 01100110 to its ASCII value.
First we figure out whether it's lower-case or upper-case. The first three bits tell us that. Upper-case letters start with 010 (64) and lower-case letters start with 011 (96). So this is a lower-case letter. Then you simply convert the last 5 bits to decimal, which would be 6 in this case.
00110 = 0+0+4+2+0 = 6
The sixth letter of the alphabet is e + 1, so this represents a lower-case f.
Punctuation
You probably want to know how to read periods, commas, question marks etc. There are special codes for those.
Comma , = 44 = 00101100
Question mark ? = 63 = 00111111
Exclamation point ! = 33 = 00100001
Space = 32 = 00100000
Period . = 46 = 00101110
Apostrophe ' = 39 = 00100111
01000001 01101110 01100100 00100000 01101110 01101111 01110111 00100000 01111001 01101111 01110101 00100000 01101011 01101110 01101111 01110111 00101110