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Polynesian People Used Binary Numbers 600 Years Ago

posted by CoolHand on Friday June 16 2017, @05:02PM   Printer-friendly
from the ancient-computer dept.

Phoenix666 writes:

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.

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  • (Score: 2) by tonyPick on Saturday June 17 2017, @07:36AM

    by tonyPick (1237) on Saturday June 17 2017, @07:36AM (#526864) Homepage Journal

    Clearly they were simply mistranslating from the 2,000 year old Chinese...

    http://www.historyofinformation.com/expanded.php?id=454 [historyofinformation.com]

    The crucial exchange began on 15 February 1701, when Leibniz wrote to Bouvet describing for his correspondent the principles of his binary arithmetic
    ...
      Bouvet immediately recognised the relationship between the hexagrams of the I ching and the binary numbers and he communicated his discovery in a letter written in Peking on 4 November 1701. This reached Leibniz, after a detour through England, on 1 April 1703. With this letter, Bouvet enclosed a woodcut of the arrangement of the hexagrams attributed to Fu-Hsi, the mythical founder of Chinese culture, which holds the key to the identification. Within a week of receiving Bouvet's letter, Leibniz had sent to Abbé Bignon for publication in the Mémoires of the Paris Academy his Explication de l'Arithmétique binaire,... & sue ce qu'elle donne le sens des anciens figures Chinoises de Fohy.

    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?

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