Roman Finger Counting

Re:Roman Finger Counting by majewsky on Friday May 15, 2020 @06:18AM (#23190586)

If you use any other base for writing numbers down, it's just as easy to perform pen-and-paper operations. The only problem with larger bases is that the multiplication tables increase quadratically. Whereas a base-10 multiplication table has 100 entries, a base-16 table already has 256 entries.

[ Parent | on HN ]

Re:Roman Finger Counting by dTal on Friday May 15, 2020 @07:28AM (#23190927)

>a base-10 multiplication table has 100 entries

Not quite! You can safely ignore identities (0, 1, and 10 itself) so you only have 8 numbers in your table. And multiplication is commutative so you only need 8+7+6... (= (8+1)(8/2) as per Gauss) = 36 entries.

Base 16 would have (14+1)(14/2) = 105 entries. So proportional to base-10, actually slightly harder than you said.

[ Parent | on HN ]

Re:Roman Finger Counting by curiousllama on Friday May 15, 2020 @10:06AM (#23192320)

The classic - detailed correction followed by "but yea you're totally right anyway" lmao

[ Parent | on HN ]

Re:Roman Finger Counting by majewsky on Saturday May 16, 2020 @03:50PM (#23206652)

A fine demonstration how "basically correct in two sentences" is better than "technically correct in five sentences" in most situations.

[ Parent | on HN ]