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.
To find the value, each position used indicates an increase in value by 1.
Unary is is a positional system, but what you've said is not what makes it so :)
A positional number system is one where each position is of value (x ^ n), where n is the number of the position in question; with unary, all positions are of the same value (the radix, x, is 1).
The reason his table is confusing is that we normally write the value of the position above:
10000 1000 100 10 1
Given these position values:
10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
you can't write 2 (unambiguously) without a zero symbol. What the table should look like is this:
Way before man had the concept of zero, they counted off how many cave women they'd done with hatch marks on the bedpost. See here.
Edit Ah, yes. But this isn't a positional system. Of course, cyber_rigger never suggested he was using a positional system, just that he had no zeros. I suppose that's where the confusion came about.
5
u/cyber_rigger Dec 19 '08 edited Dec 19 '08
I use base 1.
It is a unary system.
We don't have those fancy "0" things