this post was submitted on 30 Jun 2024
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1 11 111 1111 11111 111111
That's base 1. By convention, because it doesn't really fit the pattern of positional number systems as far as I can tell, but it gets called that.
Who calls it that? Who even uses that enough to have given it a name? Seems completely pointless...
Theoretical computer scientists, historians of mathematics.
I'm not sure where I heard the term exactly, but I know I have multiple times.
Thanks for sharing this, it's quite interesting. I found a Wikipedia article on it: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unary_numeral_system
Apparently, as you did suggest, "base 1" is a name that is used, but is somewhat a misnomer.
The article mentions that Church encoding is a kind of unary notation, which I would not have thought of, but I guess it is.
Enjoyable little rabbit-hole to zap my productivity for the day.
No problem!