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Unless the aliens are taken with trinary logic, because they have 3 digits or what not. Their computers could be ternary based.
by goatlover 9y ago
Unless the aliens are taken with trinary logic, because they have 3 digits or what not. Their computers could be ternary based.
- coderdude 9y agoThey would most likely immediately recognise base 2 whether their systems use base 3 or not.
- TrinaryWorksToo 9y agoThen they'd only use the 0th and 1st positions in their number system, which would spread out the data, but as it's compressed or encoded it would still be readable. If you've ever opened a utf-8 document in a utf-16 file reader, you'll see the letters are spread out, but still readable. It's the same idea.
- coderdude 9y agoCorrect me if I'm wrong or just not understanding what you're saying but you can't take binary, interpret it as ternary, and expect the result to be meaningful (and correct). Take 11101110 and convert it to decimal. Now, instead, interpret it as ternary then convert it to decimal. If we meant to encode the number 238 then they'd get the wrong answer.