fig conceptual view of computer ram into the cputhe operation is performedand the result is then typically written back into the ram the ram of computer is accessed frequently as program runsso it is important that we understand what happens when it is accessed (fig one analogy that is often used is that of post office the ram of computer is like collection of post office boxes each box has an address and can hold value the values you can put in ram are called bytes ( eight bits grouped togetherwith eight bits different values can be stored usually bytes are interpreted as integersso byte can hold values from to if we want to store bigger valueswe can group bytes together into words the word size of computer is either bits ( four bytesor bitsdepending on the architecture of the computer' hardware all modern computer hardware is capable of retrieving or storing word at time the post office box analogy helps us to visualize how the ram of computer is organizedbut the analogy does not serve well to show us how the ram of computer behaves if we were going to get something from post office boxor store something in post office boxthere would have to be some kind of search done to find the post office box first then the letter or letters could be placed in it or taken from it the more post office boxes in the post officethe longer that search would take this helps us understand the fundamental problem we study in this text as the size of problem space growshow does program or algorithm behavein terms of this analogyas the number of post office boxes growshow much longer does it take to store or retrieve valuethe ram of computer does not behave like post office the computer does not need to find the right ram location before the it can retrieve or store value much better analogy is group of peopleeach person representing memory location within the ram of the computer each person is assigned an address or name to store value in locationyou call out the name of the person and then tell them what value to remember it does not take any time to find the right person because all the people are listeningjust in case their name is called to retrieve valueyou call the name of the person and they tell you the value they were told to remember in this way it takes exactly the same amount of time to retrieve any value from any memory location this is how the ram of computer works it takes exactly the same amount of time to store value in any location within the ram likewiseretrieving value takes the same amount of time whether it is in the first ram location or the last this copy belongs to 'acha