4 ms·
At PARC we had a slogan: "Point of view is worth 80 IQ points." It was based on a few things from the past like how smart you had to be in Roman times to mult
by 6ren 14y ago
At PARC we had a slogan: "Point of view is worth 80 IQ points." It was based on a
few things from the past like how smart you had to be in Roman times to multiply two
numbers together; only geniuses did it. We haven't gotten any smarter, we've just
changed our representation system. We think better generally by inventing better
representations; that's something that we as computer scientists recognize as one of
the main things that we try to do.
Alan Kay http://billkerr2.blogspot.com.au/2006/12/point-of-view-is-worth-80-iq-points.html http://billkerr2.blogspot.com.au/2006/12/point-of-view-is-wo...
- taybin 14y agoAccording to this, multiplication wasn't so bad: http://turner.faculty.swau.edu/mathematics/materialslibrary/roman/ http://turner.faculty.swau.edu/mathematics/materialslibrary/...
- e12e 14y agoWithout a table? Just from memory? I think I'd prefer decimal.
- btilly 14y agoActually real Romans did multiplication on an abacus. Reading from Roman numerals to/from an abacus is an incredibly natural operation. In Europe the disappearance of abacuses was directly tied to the rise of Arabic notation.