3 ms·

I remember when I used to teach at a kids programming camp part of my curriculum included teaching them to finger count in binary. It's fairly straightforward t

I remember when I used to teach at a kids programming camp part of my curriculum included teaching them to finger count in binary. It's fairly straightforward to understand and some kids would write the base-10 equivalent (1, 2, 4, 8, ...) on the back of their fingers to practice. Occasionally a camper would ask why don't computers use base-3 instead of binary. In fairness, with 10 trits you could count to almost 60k, way better than silly binary's 1024. I imagine some of those campers went on to become excellent surgeons.

JoeAltmaier 6y ago
Somebody published a paper (back in the 80's?) that posited, digital logic should use base-3. They solved some equation and base-e was the optimum (2.718...) and that is closer to 3 than 2. But so much easier to do circuits 0-1 I guess. Or the science was wrong. Anyway, just be glad we have the sensible binary system we have. Used to use bi-quinary, ones-complement and other strange schemes. Took a surprisingly long time to settle on twos-complement integers.