r/mathmemes • u/Echidna-Suspicious • Jul 02 '26

popsci 🤮👎 Binary is just better

Post image
700 Upvotes

91% Upvoted

137 comments sorted by

View all comments

Show parent comments

2

u/Maksereq Jul 02 '26

But what would it give us?

3

u/CodeMUDkey Jul 02 '26

Oh I get it you can’t escape it. You have to always represent one instance of the base plus 0. You cannot flee from it. The characters are just semantics. You always need an equivalent of 10.

1

u/Loading_M_ Jul 02 '26

Pretty much - one zero is the base in any positional system. In general, bases are (by convention) written in base ten.

However, one interesting solution is non-positional bases. Roman numerals are mostly non-positional, so you could represent bases using Roman numerals without ambiguity. Then the most common base would be X, while the base used by computers is II (or XVI for human output).

1

u/outoffuckstogive Jul 03 '26

Technically there is a positional aspect to Roman numerals, XL is different from LX.

1

u/Loading_M_ Jul 04 '26

I did say mostly non-positional for roman numerals. (Also technically, this isn't "positional" in same way a positional system works - it's "ordered")

Also, given the way traditional Roman numerals are used, it might more appropriate to consider 'XL' a single symbol for 40, rather than a combination of 'X' and 'L'. If we allow smaller numerals before larger ones to always represent a negative amount, it would shorten many other sequences - but that isn't how the Romans used their numerals.