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.
...
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: 2, Insightful) by kurenai.tsubasa on Friday June 16 2017, @08:01PM (2 children)
Oops! You're not an AC! I need new glasses.
Well, let's revisit the comment without the <sarcasm />.
What is your proof that they have not found more proof that misogynerds have conspired to make programming languages inaccessible to womyn-born-womyn by using a naïve approach to base 2 where the first digit position is not base 2?
(Score: 2) by DeathMonkey on Friday June 16 2017, @08:32PM
I.....wait.....what?
Parsing that last sentence is like trying to solve one of those Google interview puzzles. Is that a quadruple negative?
(Score: 2) by tfried on Saturday June 17 2017, @07:52PM
Was your first unrequited love a Polynesian feminist, or something?