6 ms·
I assume they mean absolute distance abs(3-e) < abs(2-e)
by hulahoof 3y ago
I assume they mean absolute distance
abs(3-e) < abs(2-e)
- dismalpedigree 3y agoI still don’t understand why base e is the most efficient ideal. There has to be some more info on this.
- gretch 3y agoYeah I don’t even understand non-whole bases. For example, how does someone express the number 5 in base e…
- davidnc 3y agohttps://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Radix_economy https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Radix_economy The idea is that if it costs $r to store a base-r digit, then base 3 (or e in a continuous scale) turns out to be the most efficient. Obviously, there's no a priori reason to think that a 3-level gate is exactly 1.5x more expensive than a 2-level gate, so this is mostly of theoretical interest.
- joe__f 3y agoThis was a really interesting article, thank you. I'm thinking about how this would apply to human psychology of reading and writing numbers. Then it doesn't make sense to measure economy as b floor(log_b(n)+1), because adding in more symbols doesn't increase the complexity linearly for people reading or writing numbers. Maybe something like E(b,n) = f(b) g(floor(log_b(n)+1)), where f stays constant up to 10 or 20 symbols, and then increases after, and g increases faster than linearly because it's easier to read shorter numbers than longer ones.