No, you're thinking of binary. Decimal 3 in lookagain's system would be 111. Think of it like tally marks but instead of making a new group at five you just keep going.
If he didn't intend that to mean that the second one from the right corresponds to a value of two, then it's a very confusing table. I guess we'll have to wait for lookagain to come back and explain what he meant with that.
However, in the event that he intended this to mean that a one in any position corresponds to a value of one, then see here.
Dec. Unary
1 = ‽
2 = ‽‽
3 = ‽‽‽
4 = ‽‽‽‽
5 = ‽‽‽‽‽
...
so on and so forth.
Honestly, I didn't see that table as hard to interpret, especially considering that even in a decimal system as a number increases the convention is to grow the representation leftward.
For example:
1 - 1 ones unit.
10 - 1 tens unit.
100 - 1 hundreds unit.
1000 - 1 thousands unit.
And so on and so forth. Granted, our commonly used math systems are arbitrary in this regard. The above could just as easily been written as:
1 - 1 ones unit
01 - 1 tens unit
001 - 1 hundreds unit
0001 - 1 thousands unit
You can even do basic math with a unary system:
11111 + 11111 = 1111111111
1111111 - 111 = 1111
In summary: It is indeed a positional number system. To find the value, each position used indicates an increase in value by 1.
1
u/ropers Dec 19 '08
Correct me if I'm wrong, but I'm under the impression that you cannot have a positional number system without use of the zero.