(A·B)′ + C — truth table

core8 rows, 7 true

Answer

8 rows, 7 true (0, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 7)

Why this example is worth doing

Almost a tautology — only one row comes out false — and that is the teaching point, because a nearly constant function is a strong smell that a design is over-specified. The page highlights the single false row, A = B = 1, C = 0, and points out that reading it off directly gives the complement in one step: F′ = A·B·C̄. Complementing an almost-always-true function is far quicker than minimising it, and that shortcut generalises to the OFF-set method used on the POS pages.

Try your own input in the Truth table generator. Turn an expression into a full truth table, with a column for every sub-expression.

How the answer is reached

Truth table

Truth table — columns #, A, B, C, (A · B)′ + C
#ABC(A · B)′ + C
00001
10011
20101
30111
41001
51011
61100
71111

Compare with

Open this example in the Truth table generator

The field arrives filled in with this example’s input.

Note:

Notation this page assumes

  • Symbols: · is AND, + is OR, ⊕ is XOR, a prime or an overline is NOT. The field also takes ∧ ∨ ¬ ~ ! & | and the words.
  • Operator precedence, tightest first: NOT, then AND (including juxtaposition), then XOR/XNOR, then NAND/NOR, then OR, then IMPLIES, then IFF.
  • In a minterm index the first variable is the most significant bit, so over [A, B, C] minterm 5 is A·B̄·C.

Sources

  • Boole, An Investigation of the Laws of Thought (1854)
  • Shannon, “A Symbolic Analysis of Relay and Switching Circuits” (1938)