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Discovery May Help Decipher Ancient Inca String Code (nationalgeographic.com)
A discovery made in a remote mountain village high in the Peruvian Andes suggests that the ancient Inca used accounting devices made of knotted, colored strings for more than accounting. From a report on National Geographic: The devices, called khipus (pronounced kee-poos), used combinations of knots to represent numbers and were used to inventory stores of corn, beans, and other provisions. Spanish accounts from colonial times claim that Inca khipus also encoded history, biographies, and letters, but researchers have yet to decipher any non-numerical meaning in the cords and knots. Now a pair of khipus protected by Andean elders since colonial times may offer fresh clues for understanding how more elaborate versions of the devices could have stored and relayed information. "What we found is a series of complex color combinations between the cords," says Sabine Hyland, professor of anthropology at University of St Andrews in Scotland and a National Geographic Explorer. "The cords have 14 different colors that allow for 95 unique cord patterns. That number is within the range of symbols in logosyllabic writing systems." Hyland theorizes that specific combinations of colored strings and knots may have represented syllables or words.
Look, for the last time - it's not "ancient Incan code".
It's just very well-obfuscated perl.
#DeleteChrome
When I went there we spelled it correctly. Surprisingly the fault of the article rather than /. editors.
It does however put a new spin on the term spaghetti code.
They learned all their smarts from the aliens, we're better off ditching base 10 and moving to base 95.
It uses different colored strings that you pretend to tie into knots. (Note, I have abandoned my previous Dial Keyboard idea)
That was the turning point of my life--I went from negative zero to positive zero.
Be sure to drink your Ovaltine!
Taking guns away from the 99% gives the 1% 100% of the power.
It remains to be seen whether the ancient Incas supported Unicode.
...the cake is a lie
We'll make great pets
That the Inca came up with string theory?
They were using multi-color bar codes. Cool.
I was mostly joking, as the emoticon apparently failed to show. Still, Perl is very "flexible" that way compared to most languages.
Put another way, if a hyper toddler or an angry President randomly bashed around the keyboard, the probability of the results "running" without explicit errors are probably higher in Perl than other common languages.
I've heard this called the "angry monkey metric" by some.
Table-ized A.I.
Talk about spaghetti code
All joking about data types aside, did the Incas lock themselves out of advanced math by choosing a recording medium that hinders calculation? How does one calculate the sum of multiple bits of string? Let alone logarithms, fractions, long division, pi...
This seems like a remarkable discovery; a writing system that combines sight with touch. I'd have thought there'd be more of a discussion, not lame jokes about Perl. I mean, imagine combing written English with Brail. You could double the information density on the page, just for starters. I don't know what else could be achieved with such a system, but I imagine you'd have even richer ways of writing than we do now.
There is a system for subverting the system and you should use that system!
The photographs of the colored khipus show individual strings as being differently colored, rather than individual knots, or bands on the strings. If the strings were read one at a time (as opposed to trying to line up knots across different strings), this would imply the colors could only be distinctive at the higher (perhaps sentence) level, which means that they could not be used to form logograms. Or maybe the colors could stand for some "thing", so a red strand might be for potatoes, a blue strand for cuy, a green strand for..., and the knots would represent numbers of those items. But that wouldn't constitute a logosyllabic system.
"Inca Gold" apparently wasn't on the researchers reading list.