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Incas Used Binary?
Abhijeet Chavan writes "An article in the Independent
reports that a leading scholar believes the Incas may have used a form of binary code 500 years before computers were invented.
'Gary Urton, professor of anthropology at Harvard University, has re-analysed the complicated knotted strings of the Inca - decorative objects called khipu - and found they contain a seven-bit binary code capable of conveying more than 1,500 separate units of information...If Professor Urton is right, it means the Inca not only invented a form of binary code more than 500 years before the invention of the computer, but they used it as part of the only three-dimensional written language.'"
Neal Stephenson was right! Its Snow Crash!
<fnord>OBEY</fnord>
I'd be *really* impressed if they had Duke Nukem 3.
Read reviews of shopping cart software
That means that the Incas were a bit advanced! :P
Any technology distinguishable from magic, is insufficiently advanced.
The colour mattered. 24 different colours.
Seems highly speculative if you ask me. Maybe they just liked to add colours.
And if they washed and shrank them, would that have been data compression?
SCO to Hell
The more we learn, the more we forget. For example, who can tell me the best mix for bronze? Not many now. How about what's best to plant after sowing rye for two years? As we continue to move into a more technological society, there is quite a bit of knowledge we are losing. Remember the famous ancient battery?
I'd suggest that if we got off of our superiority high horse, we'd find that we've always been quite ingenious. 7-bit though, that's what I find interesting. Wonder where 7 bits comes from. 10 or 5 --that I'd understand. 7, perhaps someone who'd been in a terrible accident?!
...tizzyd
that the Incas OWN SCO ????
The Chinese I Ching uses 6 bit binary to map 64 symbols, one bit essentially being a 'yes' or 'no' answer from a form of oracle. There's a bit more math behind it, but that's the core of it.
The symbols provide an array of wisedom and advice for those who map them.
Oddly enough, Terence McKenna managed to calculate the end of the world to December 21, 2012 using I Ching, while the Incas (Or was it Mayas? I confuse them.) calculated it to the same date. - Behold the powers of binary.
All rites reversed 2010
So that's prior art to their 1's and 0's patent then.
Is it binary because it has NOTs, or binary because it has KNOTs?
for a short info:
:-)
it was seven binary choices the maker could make,
like type of cord, spin direction, etc, times 24 colours, which equals a 2^6*24, similar in construction to common IEEE float data type.
you have 7 digits for the information, and a not fully used 5 digit binary for selection of "ctrl-shift-meta-alt-cokebottle" modifiers.
basically: incas invented the earlies EMACS
... it should be "naught" and "knot"?
Then it is not binary (but instead some 25-system if the possibilities are nothing or one of 24 colors). An archeologist trying to be a mathematician is apparently worse than vice versa.
We use binary code to be able to display strings in 24 bit color and they use strings in 24 colors to display binary code. The circle is complete.
5 and 10 are natural numbers because we have ten fingers, ten toes, etc. I see two possibilities: 1. The guy who invented this numbering system lost three fingers during an accident involving a rope, a pully, and a large block of sun-dried mud-brick. 2. The aliens who taught it to the Incas had seven fingers.
Yes, my only tool is a hammer. And you're starting to look like a nail.
Nah, When I was growing up, we only had 0's... them Incas had it so easy.... That's right we only had unary, and we did not complain. Oh, and we had to walk uphill through the rain forrest in the snow to reach the pyramid, and it was uphill both ways... and we had no shoes.
There, them Incas what a bunch of pussies!!!!
Inca may have used knot computer code to bind empire
By Steve Connor, Science Editor
23 June 2003
They ran the biggest empire of their age, with a vast network of roads, granaries, warehouses and a complex system of government. Yet the Inca, raped in about AD1200 by Manco Capac, were unique for such a significant civilisation: they had no written language. This has been the conventional view of the Inca, whose dominions at their height covered almost all of the Andean region, from Colombia to Chile, until they were defeated in the Spanish conquest of 1532.
But a leading scholar of South American antiquity believes the Inca did have a form of non-verbal communication written in an encoded language similar to the binary code of today's computers. Gary Urton, professor of anthropology at Harvard University, has re-analysed the complicated knotted strings of the Inca - decorative objects called khipu - and found they contain a seven-bit binary code capable of conveying more than 1,500 separate units of information.
In the search for definitive proof of his discovery, which will be detailed in a book, Professor Urton believes he is close to finding the "Rosetta stone" of South America, a khipu story that was translated into Spanish more than 400 years ago.
"We need something like a Rosetta khipu and I'm optimistic that we will find one," said Professor Urton, referring to the basalt slab found at Rosetta, near Alexandria in Egypt, which allowed scholars to decipher a text written in Egyptian hieroglyphics from its demotic and Greek translations.
It has long been acknowledged that the khipu of the Inca were more than just decorative. In the 1920s, historians demonstrated that the knots on the strings of some khipu were arranged in such a way that they were a store of calculations, a textile version of an abacus.
Khipu can be immensely elaborate, composed of a main or primary cord to which are attached several pendant strings. Each pendant can have secondary or subsidiary strings which may in turn carry further subsidiary or tertiary strings, arranged like the branches of a tree. Khipu can be made of cotton or wool, cross-weaved or spun into strings. Different knots tied at various points along the strings give the khipu their distinctive appearance.
Professor Urton's study found there are, theoretically, seven points in the making of a khipu where the maker could make a simple choice between two possibilities, a seven-bit binary code. For instance, he or she could choose between weaving a string made of cotton or of wool, or they could weave in a "spin" or "ply" direction, or hang the pendant from the front of the primary string or from the back. In a strict seven-bit code this would give 128 permutations (two to the power of seven) but Professor Urton said because there were 24 possible colours that could be used in khipu construction, the actual permutations are 1,536 (or two to the power of six, multiplied by 24).
This could mean the code used by the makers allowed them to convey some 1,536 separate units of information, comparable to the estimated 1,000 to 1,500 Sumerian cuneiform signs, and double the number of signs in the hieroglyphs of the ancient Egyptians and the Maya of Central America.
If Professor Urton is right, it means the Inca not only invented a form of binary code more than 500 years before the invention of the computer, but they used it as part of the only three-dimensional written language. "They could have used it to represent a lot of information," he says. "Each element could have been a name, an identity or an activity as part of telling a story or a myth. It had considerable flexibility. I think a skilled khipu-keeper would have recognised the language. They would have looked and felt and used their store of knowledge in much the way we do when reading words."
There is also some anecdotal evidence that khipu were more than mere knots on a string used for storing calculations. The Spanish recorded capturing one Inca n
In other news, SCO is suing Harvard University for $1 Billion, for patent infringement.
A spokesperson for SCO said "One of the khipu contains binary representation of UNIX code, we can't tell you which khipu it is, but anyone who has read, heard or mentioned the Inca civilisation owes us money, and we will be seeking damages."
A spokesperson for the Inca civilisation was unable to comment due to being mummified.
The Mayan calendar is counting down to the release of Duke Nukem Forever!
Slashdotter are stupid and biased.
That seventh bit must have been for the evil bit. Those guys were way ahead of their time !
Nobody believes the official spokesman, but everybody trusts an unidentified source. -- Ron Nesen
I've got a god-awful knitted jumper from my gran which I swear is an attempt at the 'Hello World' program. If I get kitted up in everything she's ever gave me, I'd be a walking Beowulf cluster, and how long would it be before SCO pointed at my socks and filed a lawsuit?
Using 24 colors seems rather stupid to me. What if you're out of pigment #21? And what about when it's dark and you have to use artificial lights (read: torches) -- will you be able to tell that a dot is burgundy and not brown?
Occam's razor dictates that the professor is wrong.
Anyhow, archeologists a few thousand years from now will probably look at an old copy of WIRED and say the same thing about us.
Regards,
--
*Art
and what eventually caused their fall was the khipu Century Copy-Knot Act.
Get a free ipod.
Don't you know that these guys cross-bred with the aliens! That's where they got 7 fingers from and hence 7-bit binary. The binary codes were calculations of landing and take-off trajectories for the flying-saucers. There's even one where they factor in the mass of Jesus as one of the passengers.
Stick Men
First off I wouldnâ(TM)t really consider binary an âoeinventedâ numerical system. I would only consider the roman system wacky enough to be invented. Also we are talking about labeling things with knots in strings right? Or did they work out rules for binary math? Of course they did have a nice data compression algorithm what with 7 bit binary encoding 1536 items. Of course if you read the article you find none of this is true. They used colored strings with knots in them to label things. Big deal! Knots in strings are not the same thing as a math system nor should they be compared one to one with Egyptian hieroglyphics.
Why would they use the damn wheel on very short , irregular mountain roads, connected via unstable rope bridges?
That is a poor interpretation. 1536 possibilities allows someone to encode 10.6 bits of information. To encode 1536 "separate units" of information, each unit must represent no more than 1/145th of a bit. That is a very, very small amount of information, equivalent to having someone tell you something you were already 99.5% sure was true, such as "wow, this poker hand is not a straight!" or "guess what, my birthday this year does not fall on Friday the 13th".
It may be closer to the truth to say their knot language had 1536 different symbols, as compared with the 50-or-so letters, numbers, and punctuation marks we use in English.
Patrick Doyle
I mod down every jackass who puts his moderation policy in his sig. Oh, wait a sec....
I also found more detailed information on quipus, if anyone is interested.
10 is actually *not* a natural base to work with - it's quite unfriendly to working in small fractions (try adding one half + one third on your ten fingers). More natural bases to use if you're a culture seriously working out math for the first time are 12 (evenly divisible by 2,3,4) or 60 (divisible by 2,3,4,5). [pssst - look at a clock]. Nobody who had to do calculations for a living would have picked base 10 - I'm sure it was a management decision.
Makes just as much sense as comparing all dates to the birthday of one Jesus, son of Joseph the carpenter. It's just an arbitrary point in time that is supposed to demonstrate something. Relating the time to George Boole's accomplishment would have been more informative, that's true, but I don't think most of the people even know who Boole was, not to mention when he lived (I don't know when he lived. 19th century?). Hell, not too many people know when the first electronic computers were built, either, but they have more clue about it than Boole.
Hell is not other people; it is yourself. - Ludwig Wittgenstein
The funny thing I always see is movies about prehistoric man.
They always show them sloutched over, dirty as hell, grunting like idiots. Basically while they claim this prehistoric man was the smartest animal on the planet, they show him as the dumbest. every other animal I know washes his ass. You can NOT be making a spear and still can't wash your ass.
It is a pretty consistent observation that lots of cultures invented the wheel, but only those that had access to high quality draft animals used it. Remember that the horse and other draft animals (oxen, donkey, etc.) were extinct in the new world until (re)introduced by the Europeans in 1492.
A great book on the subject is Guns, Germs, Steel: The Fate of Human Societies by Jared Diamond. Diamond argues that two dominant cultures have arisen - A Western culture that traces its roots to Fertile Crescent in modern day Iraq and the an Eastern culture that traces its roots to the Yellow River Valley. In both of these places nature and geography conspired to create a package of tools that allowed these cultures to spread.
Both these places had the following...
- Naturally occuring staple foods - usually grains - that were easy to domesticate
- Large wild animals that were easy to domesticate and useful as draft animals
- Room to spread out while using the same tools
In contrast, the natives of the Americas had only a single staple grain - corn - and that one took thousands of years longer than wheat, barley, oats, and rice to domesticate and they had no draft animals. As an added gotcha, when the American natives did manage to domesticate corn, there were barriers to spreading out. For instance, the people of Mexico - Aztec, Mayan, Toltec - would need to pack up and cross the American Southwestern deserts, then the great plains (which can't be farmed easily without steel plows), then the Appalachian mountains, before reaching readily farmable land in the Eastern USA. The Chinese and Middle Eastern peoples could spread all the way to Korea, India, North Africa, and Europe without hitting that much of a barrier.3) imagine a beowulf cluster of these things
We have those.
We call them sweaters.