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It's likely a reference to the radix economy [0], however it's actually very minor for the cases where it works. And in "the best way to count"[1] there compell
by f_devd 3y ago
It's likely a reference to the radix economy [0], however it's actually very minor for the cases where it works. And in "the best way to count"[1] there compelling arguments as to why the formulation used on Wikipedia is not necessarily correct for arbitrary precision numbers as well as being bad for human notation compared to binary.
[0]: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Radix_economy[1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Radix_economy[1]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rDDaEVcwIJM https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rDDaEVcwIJM
- akoboldfrying 3y agoThat was an interesting read, thanks. I'm not convinced that the "cost" of a b-ary digit is appropriately modelled as exactly b in all circumstances, though it is in the example of minimising the average length of time a caller must wait when using a phone menu system.