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Polynesians May Have Invented Binary Math
sciencehabit writes "How old is the binary number system? Perhaps far older than the invention of binary math in the West. The residents of a tiny Polynesian island may have been doing calculations in binary—a number system with only two digits—centuries before it was described by Gottfried Leibniz, the co-inventor of calculus, in 1703."
Those who understood binary, and those who didn't.
Science advances one funeral at a time- Max Planck
I'm sorry for you! If you had all of your fingers, you'd make it to 1023!
GP probably uses signed integers.
Either they did or they didn't.
If God forks the Universe every time you roll a die, he'd better have a damned good memory.
Wouldn't that be "Binesians"?
Table-ized A.I.
There was a Mayan tribe that went around naked. The men used base 21 and the women base 22
rewriting history since 2109
Leibniz freely admits that he took ideas from the I Ching: http://www.leibniz-translations.com/binary.htm
Perhaps an apocryphal story, but it goes that Leibniz was introduced to the I Ching (Yijing) oracle by a Catholic missionary friend who had gotten it translated into Latin (must have been strange). Anyway, the story goes that Leibniz instantly recognized the binary system in the 64 hexagrams and 8 trigrams. The I Ching is somewhere between 2,500 and 4,000 yrs. old in the format and ordering it still has today.
Development is programmable; Discovery is not programmable. (Fuller)
That's called thumb's-complement - still in IEEE committee, but quite handy.
So you are always negative when good looking women are around..... Sorry for you.
You now owe us royalties on every digital computer built in the last century. Please pay the total of one gazillion dollars to the following bank account.
-Signed, Polynesia
Humans used binary long before Leibniz and long before the Polynesians mentioned in the article. For one example:
2 tablespoons = 1 ounce
2 ounces = 1 jack
2 jacks = 1 gill
2 gills = 1 cup
2 cups = 1 pint
2 pints = 1 quart
2 quarts = 1 pottle
2 pottles = 1 gallon
2 gallons = 1 peck
2 pecks = 1 kenning
2 kennings = 1 bushel
2 bushels = 1 strike
2 strikes = 1 coomb
2 coombs = 1 hogshead
2 hogsheads = 1 butt
The article, however, is remarkably weak in support for the hypothesis that the people of Mangareva (the "tiny Pacific island" mentioned) actually used binary arithmetic, since in fact it doesn't give any evidence at all that they actually used binary arithmetic. What it says is they have number words for three binary powers of ten:paua for 20; tataua for 40; and varu for 80.
The article wasn't so much weak, as it was in awe of an accident of hindsight. (It only looks "special" because we settled on binary for computers.)
It explicitly made the point that base 10 was used except to refer to large groups.
Their "special words" took hold only after they ran out of fingers.
In fact, if you look at it as counting the number of "bodies worth of fingers and toes" it looks less like using binary and more like "We can't count that high, but there was one fish in the pond for every finger and toe of each person in our boat). After that they just counted boats.
Its really not much different than westerners counting in dozens, and grosses (something that wiki unconvincingly attributes to the convenience of 12 having many divisors. From the same article you learn there were Latin terms for groups of 15, 20, etc. It seems that special, extra ordinal counting numbers for baskets full of stuff are not that unusual.
Sig Battery depleted. Reverting to safe mode.
So, decades of stories containing obscure acronyms deemed unworthy of explanation, now the editors decide binary needs to be defined for the Slashdot audience.