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A comment on Building a ternary computer at home: a software emulator. Parent comment

Re:Building a ternary computer at home: a software emulator by hinkley on Monday April 13, 2020 @01:21PM (#22857784)
base 7 is very nearly e^2, and 20 is almost exactly e^3. Base 20 would fix many problems with floating point math, wouldn't it?

By the time someone built a base 20 computer it would probably be an anachronism anyway.

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Re:Building a ternary computer at home: a software emulator by SilasX on Monday April 13, 2020 @03:38PM (#22859233)
Okay but what's the significance of (non-unity) powers of e? e is the optimum of a specific function[1], and you lose the benefits for higher values.

It's true that you can conveniently represent the numbers by using integer powers of the base (like representing binary with hexadecimal), but the whole reason e is a "good" base in the first place is because you're (partially) minimizing the number of distinct symbols needed to represent a number, and you lose that once you go to a higher base.

Plus, using a slightly-off integer like 7 breaks the integer-power-mapping anyway.

[1] x ^ (N/x) for any N.

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