> To see why, consider an important metric that tallies up how much room a system will need to store data. You start with the base of the number system, which i

> To see why, consider an important metric that tallies up how much room a system will need to store data. You start with the base of the number system, which is called the radix, and multiply it by the number of digits needed to represent some large number in that radix. For example, the number 100,000 in base 10 requires six digits. Its “radix economy” is therefore 10 × 6 = 60. In base 2, the same number requires 17 digits, so its radix economy is 2 × 17 = 34. And in base 3, it requires 11 digits, so its radix economy is 3 × 11 = 33. For large numbers, base 3 has a lower radix economy than any other integer base. I thought that was interesting so I made (well, Claude 3.5 Sonnet made) a little visualization, plotting the radix efficiency of different bases against a range of numbers: https://paulsmith.github.io/radix-efficiency/radix_effciency.html https://paulsmith.github.io/radix-efficiency/radix_effciency...