5 ms·
When I was in middle school I first learned the basic idea of the fundamental theorem of arithmetic and my instantaneous first idea was that we should assign a
by mlthoughts2018 7y ago
When I was in middle school I first learned the basic idea of the fundamental theorem of arithmetic and my instantaneous first idea was that we should assign a unique prime number to each attribute that a biological entity can have, and then multiplying together the prime factors for all the characteristics would give the unique integer ID for that biological entity.
So if having a limb is “7” then some creature with three limbs gets 7^3 in its prime factorization, and so on.
Obviously it is an incredibly stupid idea, but 12-year-old me was quite impressed by the thought of it.
- erreJulian 7y agoIt is, in a way, the idea behind Borge's “Analytical Language of John Wilkins”: https://www.alamut.com/subj/artiface/language/johnWilkins.html https://www.alamut.com/subj/artiface/language/johnWilkins.ht...
- earthicus 7y agoLol, that's a great story; if only that sort of thing was practical, how much more fun life would be :-) I actually had the opportunity to do something similar not too long ago. I'm a beginner learning to program and I had a little puzzle that I got from my grandma ~15 years ago. You have a tower of blocks with symbols on them, and have to arrange the blocks so that all of the symbols on each side are distinct [1]. The problem was small enough that I could just model each symbol as a prime and check uniqueness by seeing of the product was equal to 2 * 3 * 5 * 7 * 11 * 13. [1] https://imgur.com/vTZotGC https://imgur.com/vTZotGC
- kmill 7y agoWhether or not it's incredibly stupid, you're in good company: it occurred to Leibniz, too. Search for 'prime' at https://pron.github.io/posts/computation-logic-algebra-pt1 https://pron.github.io/posts/computation-logic-algebra-pt1 (though for him the unique IDs were for concepts rather than individuals).
- pvaldes 7y agospecies complex, hybrids, mimicry, evolutive convergence, chimaeras... Life is too complicated and exhuberant to reduce it to a math formula
- adrianN 7y agoNo it's not. It is likely too complicated to reduce to a formula that you can evaluate in reasonable time, or too complicated to measure with sufficient accuracy to even know what numbers to put into that formula, but life still follows the laws of physics and to the best of our knowledge they can be expressed in mathematical language.
- ovi256 7y agoYou've rediscovered one-hot binary encoding with prime numbers :)
- magneticnorth 7y agoIt is a neat idea! This is very close to how Godel numbering (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/G%C3%B6del_numbering https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/G%C3%B6del_numbering) works, to give every possible mathematical formula in a fixed language its own unique number.
- deleted 7y ago[deleted]