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Binary arithmetic, the basis of all virtually digital computation today, is usually said to have been invented at the start of the eighteenth century by the German mathematician Gottfried Leibniz. But a study now shows that a kind of binary system was already in use 300 years earlier among the people of the tiny Pacific island of Mangareva in French Polynesia.
The discovery, made by analysing historical records of the now almost wholly assimilated Mangarevan culture and language and reported in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, suggests that some of the advantages of the binary system adduced by Leibniz might create a cognitive motivation for this system to arise spontaneously, even in a society without advanced science and technology.
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Mangarevans combined base-10 representation with a binary system. They had number words for 1 to 10, and then for 10 multiplied by several powers of 2. The word takau (which Bender and Beller denote as K) means 10; paua (P) means 20; tataua (T) is 40; and varu (V) stands for 80. In this notation, for example, 70 is TPK and 57 is TK7.Bender and Beller show that this system retains the key arithmetical simplifications of true binary, in that you don't need to memorize lots of number facts but follow only a few simple rules, such as 2 × K = P and 2 × P = T.
(Score: 4, Insightful) by weeds on Friday June 16 2017, @06:36PM (5 children)
So they had a name for 10, 20, 40, and 80. By combining the names you could get representations of numbers. Aside from 10, 20, 40, and 80 not being all of the powers of 10, how is this in any way "binary" (a number system based on place values and 0 and 1)?
Kind of like ten x one hundred is one thousand and ten x one thousand is ten thousand. You get that for free when your named numbers are based on a common multiplier...
What is TPK x TK7? Too hard? How about TPK + TK7?
This looks a lot more like Roman Numerals than any place valued number system not to mention a base 2 number system.
Help me out here...
Get money out of politics! [mayday.us]
(Score: 0, Redundant) by kurenai.tsubasa on Friday June 16 2017, @07:53PM (1 child)
Sorry, can't help you. It's irrefutable proof that assigned males are using an unnatural definition of “binary” to exclude womyn-born-womyn and minorities from tech careers. Obviously, this is a more pure form of binary than our misogynist base 2 system.
If only we hadn't conspired to prevent, with our insistence on base 10, base 8, or base 2 notations, womyn-born-womyn from writing something like this:
for (uintV_t i = 0; i < TK7; i++) {
std::cout << i << std::endl;
}
Unfortunately, being a misogynerd, I would not be able to determine more precisely exactly what a uintV_t is. It might only hold values up 1 before the value represented as 80 in our misogynist notation, but it could also be quite different in ways a misogynist like me would not be able to anticipate. I only have experience with misogynist data types such as unit8_t.
(As a side note, we misogynists of course know that doing that with a uint8_t and expecting the cout object to print numerals would require casting i to int before the insertion operator. Also of course, we know that this depends on how a uint8_t is typedefed, because we have intentionally created these complications as a means of excluding womyn-born-womyn. I'm certain that a more natural system such that these noble people in TFS used would simply know whether the programmer, being a superior and complete being such as womyn-born-womyn are, intended to output some emojis and playing card suits or numerals.)
I'm certain that c+= has always had support for the syntax above. Always. We're also still at war with Eastasia.
AC didn't believe I was serious about sarcasm, so I will omit the sarcasm tags on this attempt and try to be more serious.
(Score: 3, Insightful) by takyon on Friday June 16 2017, @09:53PM
You should write more journals.
[SIG] 10/28/2017: Soylent Upgrade v14 [soylentnews.org]
(Score: 2) by JeanCroix on Saturday June 17 2017, @01:08AM
The archeologists in question simply don't understand binary..?
(Score: 2) by tonyPick on Saturday June 17 2017, @07:36AM
Clearly they were simply mistranslating from the 2,000 year old Chinese...
http://www.historyofinformation.com/expanded.php?id=454 [historyofinformation.com]
Link spotted on the HackerNews thread on the same topic. And looking at the delivery times on those letters, isn't it sort of awesome to live in the future at times?
(Score: 2) by tfried on Saturday June 17 2017, @07:34PM
Not quite. The striking thing about Roman numerals is that they are clearly not based on an understanding of powers. They have "digits" for 1, 5, 10, 50, 100, 500, 1000, but each "digit" will typically have to be represented by a multitude of signs. Such as XLII for a mere 42, or inscrutable beasts like MCMXCVIII. It's not surprising that this system was replaced by the Arabic system, worldwide. (And still we see fascinating proofs of innumeracy in inconsistencies such as sixteen / twenty-six - or even the French soixante-dix-sept ("60+10+7")).
The interesting bits about this are that a) the system probably developed independently, b) it is apparently based on an understanding of powers, and the representation of digits, c) it is unique in using two different bases (one of which happens to be 2).