What's a good numerical base?

[RGBVideo]

60

[Winston]

12 bucks says they'd have abandoned a debate like this one long ago and moved on to more interesting things.

[RGBVideo]

Originally posted by snoopy369
It's important to realize that while, NOW, we know that 16 is probably the most useful to us (in a digital age and all), the folks creating this system may not have been thinking of digital, or boolean, or anything like that; they were thinking of counting things. Thinking of how it might have come about is very important, and I suspect (as Lul explains) 12 is the most likely to have come about in this manner (or, perhaps, 60 ?).

yeah, 60.

danS knows his history

the elites of the society slowly abandoned it when an increasing amount of people needed to use numbers and dumbed it down by dividing it with 5, to base 12

base 16 sucks, not dividable with 3 or 6, much harder to memorize in common use

[Alinestra Covelia]

Originally posted by Winston
12 bucks says they'd have abandoned a debate like this one long ago and moved on to more interesting things.

Yes, but is that "12 bucks" in base 16, 12, or 6?

[-Jrabbit]

I think that was in base 3.

[SlowwHand]

0

[carnide_]

This is science fiction at large!
Why center the discussion in man like fingers? Mushrooms don’t even "think" like primates.
How is the world seen by mushrooms?
Do they will use a unified number concept?
A “pair”, a “couple”, “both”, these words are avatars for the unified two. Historically, the unification is recent. Our common language still remembers the old ways.

[OneFootInTheGrave]

Originally posted by Alinestra Covelia


I find the 16 base argument to be quite persuasive, if only because of the issue of it being easiest to halve things by eye.
...
.

at least someone is reading

[Thue]

Originally posted by VJ
60

Good luck memorizing the multiplication tables in that system for calculating without an electronic calculator. Quick, what is 43*57?

Also, good luck memorizing the 50 additional number symbols you will need.

[Q Classic]

Originally posted by Alinestra Covelia


Yes, but is that "12 bucks" in base 16, 12, or 6?

b16: 12 bucks
b12: 10 bucks
b6: 20 bucks

Though, it's still the same amount...

[Ecthy]

b16: C bucks

[carnide_]

Why a numeric system based on a polynomial?
Why not on primes, direct!
...17,13,11,7,5,3,2,1

Any integer prime decomposition is unique.

3== ...000100

15==...0001100


21== ...00010100

0== ...0000000000

1== ...0000000001 (convention: Last digit is always zero, except for the unit quantity. Alternative convention: Last digit is always one, except for the zero quantity. Convention in use is easy to spot, just by looking)

Some recursiviness is needed:
4== ...00000[...00010]0

and so on.

- - -
As far as I've been told, this is the system used by the aldebaran astrotraders. Its imune to space radiation, mutations, relativistics effects and economic woes.

[Zkribbler]

Originally posted by Lul Thyme
...

Throughout history, unit systems used numbers like 12 a lot (12 inches to a foot, 24 hours in a day, etc...) because it has more factors and hence you can divide a foot by more numbers to get an integer number of inches.

12 can be divided by 2, by 3, by 2-squared.

So can 60, and 60 can also be divided by 5. But 60 is a really big number, and it scares me.

[Krill]

tbh I'm waiting for someone to even create a fictitious race that used base zero...

[Q Classic]

Originally posted by Ecthy
b16: C bucks

Oh, yeah. Whoops.