Join the discussion
Write your take first — we'll ask for email only when you're ready to publish.
- Hacker News
- Is this the perfect clickbait title for nerd sniping?
One of the best I can recall.
- > If you knew somehow that some symbol corresponds to 20, then you’d know they didn’t use base 20 because base b doesn’t have a single symbol for b.
Well, this is plainly false.
by thaumasiotes - It has been pointed out before that although we know of no cultures which used a bijective base number system (well, besides base 1!) it might not be immediately obvious if they did.
I think it was in a paper which was about how many times the bijective base system had been independently reinvented by mathematicians.
by vintermann - What I wonder is: why has nobody noticed that code editors lack a concept of 0?
When you're writing code, you can express any concept except that of an unfilled hole. We've rearranged every part of the coding process in a twisted-up way, all for the lack of a way to express lack.
If you want to be more clear about what I mean, look to tools which can express holes like https://scratch.mit.edu and https://hazel.org. They give the feeling of letting things snap together like lego bricks. Indeed, lego bricks themselves function because of the negative space (the holes) in them!
by conartist6 - The question is the title is left unanswered by this shallow article. At least it's not AI slop since there are spelling mistakes ("You’re best hope").
> Say you’ve found 17 numeric symbols. You might infer that the writing used a base 20 system
Reals numerical systems are much more diverse than that. For instance, Babylon used a base 60 (hence our minutes and hours). But there were much less than 60 numeric symbols, since they had a symbol for 1 and 10. So 2 symbols for a base 60!
> never appears at the beginning of a number, you might infer that is a zero
In the later times Babylonians had a kind of zero, but it was very limited, only used to point the lack of a number between two, i.e. "2∅1" but never "21∅∅" which was written "21" (so numbers were ambiguous if the context didn't give the magnitude).
And Babylonians had floating numbers. So "4" could also mean 4/60.
What I mean is that Babylon had a zero, but it only covered a part of the positional modern zero. They could not write 0 - 3. And if their zero had been fully positional, there would have been numbers beginning with it, i.e. sexagecimals floats.
by idoubtit - Looks like translating a positional numbering system from ancient cultures than ruling out or not if they had the concept of zero. It may be a single use symbol, here is nothing, instead of being part of bigger amounts. Numbering systems doesn't have to be positional (nor go too far).by gmuslera
- Zero has two roles: as a positional placeholder and as a cardinal value (nothingness or net-zero). This only addresses the former.by lisp2240