"The smallest=the most elegant=the most desirable" seems like terrible reasoning, and similar to the reasoning behind the infamous 'Uno': https://en.wikipedia.

"The smallest=the most elegant=the most desirable" seems like terrible reasoning, and similar to the reasoning behind the infamous 'Uno': https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Parts-per_notation#Uno https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Parts-per_notation#Uno However, I don't entirely disagree with where you go with this, but in my opinion, one ought to: 1. Use the nat an normalize everything else (which might seem like an odd idea at first, but think about it): https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nat_%28unit%29 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nat_%28unit%29 But, if we assume you want to avoid the normalization, then it would seem more sensible, due to numerical efficiency, to use balanced ternary, which actually has, unlike what people who rather cluelessly apply the literal textbook (and terrible) metric of 'Radix efficiency'(an entirely artificial measure originally invented to account for engineering concerns related to vacuum tube spacing.) would presume, higher numeric efficiency than unsigned ternary, as shown here by a then Indian computer science student, Abhijit Bhattacharjee, whose work on this unfortunately only remains accessible via the Internet Archive Wayback Machine: https://web.archive.org/web/20090312094241/http://abhijit.info/tristate/tristate.html#Base3 https://web.archive.org/web/20090312094241/http://abhijit.in... He actually got a reply by Marvin Minsky(to an email he had sent him) at some point (also available via archive.org, but only if you do a lot of trickery which I can't do from my mobile phone, I've however previously verified the quote he provided on the bottom of the page and it does, by all things I could account for, indeed seem genuine), which I'll quote here: "Yes it is a fascinating subject, and your explorations and descriptions are extremely readable. I hope it gets the interest of more mathematicians."