Question

In the computer game Civilization, a character representing a world leader who advocates non-violence is uncharacteristically aggressive. In the first version of the game, this was an unintentional effect caused by a bug.

In the game, world leader characters are assigned an ‘aggression’ score and this is increased or decreased according to changes in circumstance. For example, if a leader adopts democracy, their aggression score is decreased by 2.

This particular world leader was given the lowest possible aggression of 1 by the game makers, to reflect that they thought the leader was unlikely to declare war on another character.

Given that the aggression score is stored as an 8-bit unsigned integer representation, do the following:

• i.Write down the largest binary integer that can be represented in an 8-bit unsigned integer and by converting this to decimal, show that the largest possible aggression score is 255.
• ii.Name the problem that occurs if the initial aggression score is decreased by 2.
• iii.Explain, using the relevant binary numbers, why the initial aggression score becomes the maximum value of 255 when it is reduced by 2.

Answer 1

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