4 ms·

one, two, three, four, five, six, seven, eight, nine, ten finger overflow! (ten plus) one, (ten plus) two, ... For base ten, you can just put a pebble down f

one, two, three, four, five, six, seven, eight, nine, ten finger overflow! (ten plus) one, (ten plus) two, ... For base ten, you can just put a pebble down for each overflow, and the fingers will always count the units. If you were using base eleven, you would count [1,2,3,4,5,6,7,8,9,A],[10,11,12,13,14,15,16,17,18,19],[1A,20...], so a given finger wouldn't always correspond to the same digit.

eru 13y ago
Oh, base 10 leads to redundancy when finger counting. Because all ten fingers is the same as 0 fingers plus token. Base 11 wouldn't have that problem. I don't understand "[..] so a given finger wouldn't always correspond to the same digit."
grannyg00se 13y ago
But your writing system overflowed before your finger overflow. That's not very intuitive. Each finger represents a unique glyph until suddenly on the last finger it takes two glyphs to represent it. If you were using base eleven you'd put your pebble down when you hit dec(11) aka base11(10). That pebble represents dec(11). Then first finger would be dec(12) aka base11(11) and once again your first finger represents 1. So in base11 [1,2,3,4,5,6,7,8,9,A] - pebble - [11,12,13,14,15,16,17,18,19,1A] A pebble and five fingers would be dec(16) instead of dec(15) but your five fingers still represent 5. The pebble represents 11 instead of 10. But really, once you're into double digits you normally wouldn't be counting on your fingers anymore. You write 10.
- bediger4000 13y ago
  This is exactly the system that Robert Forslund advocates as an explanation of certain ancient numbering systems in "A Logical Alternative to the Existing Positional Numbering System" (http://citeseerx.ist.psu.edu/viewdoc/download?doi=10.1.1.44.59&rep=rep1&type=pdf http://citeseerx.ist.psu.edu/viewdoc/download?doi=10.1.1.44....).

4 ms·

one, two, three, four, five, six, seven, eight, nine, ten finger overflow! (ten plus) one, (ten plus) two, ... For base ten, you can just put a pebble down f

by seryoiupfurds 13y ago

eru 13y ago
Oh, base 10 leads to redundancy when finger counting. Because all ten fingers is the same as 0 fingers plus token. Base 11 wouldn't have that problem. I don't understand "[..] so a given finger wouldn't always correspond to the same digit."
grannyg00se 13y ago
But your writing system overflowed before your finger overflow. That's not very intuitive. Each finger represents a unique glyph until suddenly on the last finger it takes two glyphs to represent it. If you were using base eleven you'd put your pebble down when you hit dec(11) aka base11(10). That pebble represents dec(11). Then first finger would be dec(12) aka base11(11) and once again your first finger represents 1. So in base11 [1,2,3,4,5,6,7,8,9,A] - pebble - [11,12,13,14,15,16,17,18,19,1A] A pebble and five fingers would be dec(16) instead of dec(15) but your five fingers still represent 5. The pebble represents 11 instead of 10. But really, once you're into double digits you normally wouldn't be counting on your fingers anymore. You write 10.
- bediger4000 13y ago
  This is exactly the system that Robert Forslund advocates as an explanation of certain ancient numbering systems in "A Logical Alternative to the Existing Positional Numbering System" (http://citeseerx.ist.psu.edu/viewdoc/download?doi=10.1.1.44.59&rep=rep1&type=pdf http://citeseerx.ist.psu.edu/viewdoc/download?doi=10.1.1.44....).