Tuesday, September 9, 2008

Th3 Nam3 0xf th3 Gam3

"The 10 Nerds" -- inspired by the saying "There are only 10 kinds of people in this world: those that understand binary, and those that don't."

Binary ("bi-" indicating two), for those of you who don't know, is a method of counting using only two unique values (0 and 1) for each digit.

Decimal ("deci-" indicating ten) is the standard method for counting that we are all familiar with. In decimal, each digit can be one of 10 unique values (0-9 inclusive).

So, here is how to count to ten (from zero, so 11 digits) in each:

Decimal: 0, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10
Binary: 0, 1, 10, 11, 100, 101, 110, 111, 1000, 1001, 1010

Note that in decimal it is not necessary to use a second digit until we have exhausted all of the unique values with the first digit.

Also note that the same is true for binary, it just happens much faster.

Thus, the title "The 10 Nerds" is to be interpreted in decimal as "The 2 Nerds".

Welcome to our world...

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