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I learned to count in binary on my fingers in high school, and I can confirm that it's more physically challenging than counting the conventional way, and also
by schoen 8y ago
I learned to count in binary on my fingers in high school, and I can confirm that it's more physically challenging than counting the conventional way, and also harder to remember and communicate numbers without translating them into language.
Although you can only represent 10 values instead of 1024 values, remembering one of those values is also correspondingly about 100 times easier.
Plus, it's easy to teach the direct correspondence between fingers and objects even to children or to illiterate or innumerate adults. We can imagine people using fingers this way for a straightforward matching task: "I saw this many dogs!" "I'll give you this many melons!"
- nine_k 8y agoIndeed, the unary system is the easiest for very small numbers.
- schoen 8y agoAnd then it leads to separate "uninterpreted" names for each number of fingers that a person can hold up. After that there's a natural route toward place value with units of either one or two hands. Even the shapes of the Roman numerals may have originated from chunking "hands" as units: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Roman_numerals#Hand_signals https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Roman_numerals#Hand_signals (although the Romans did use further multiplicative combinations of 5s and 10s, they didn't come up with implicit ways to continue the process indefinitely)