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05.05.05
- Thread starter virividox
- Start date
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So what time zone is God in, anyway? 
(10 points if you can name the movie in which this question is asked.)
(10 points if you can name the movie in which this question is asked.)
yeah... the seniors at my school had a field day today.
Although, I don't think it will be happen, but it would be awesome if my class got to graduate on 06/06/06.
666... hehe
Although, I don't think it will be happen, but it would be awesome if my class got to graduate on 06/06/06.
666... hehe
http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0114558/clayj said:So what time zone is God in, anyway?
(10 points if you can name the movie in which this question is asked.)
Did I hear my name?virividox said:well im not in australia but it is official 05.05.05 there
hehe maybe we need dr q to do some number crunching, any number crunching
In case you were curious if I noticed the date, yes. I posted about 5/5/5 waaaaaay over here.
We had a little office celebration at 5/5/5 5:5:5. I'm not the only geek there.
Exciting number crunching:
5-5 => 0
5/5 => 1
That's all you need to build your own 5-based binary computer!
Doctor Q said:
I'll let you get started on that one... much rather just use the system of binary in place now (Base 8 IIRC).
It would be interesting however if there were more than just 0s and 1s... you could get a 33% increase in speed just by adding a 2! Oh, and you would need to totally re-create your vision of hardware as we know it.
Minor detail.
Mechcozmo said:I'll let you get started on that one... much rather just use the system of binary in place now (Base 8 IIRC).
It would be interesting however if there were more than just 0s and 1s... you could get a 33% increase in speed just by adding a 2! Oh, and you would need to totally re-create your vision of hardware as we know it.
Imagine if you did base 10? All that speed.
What I would love to see is some MEMS people create Babbage's Analytic Engine.
I wrote a paper on three-valued logic for a math course - does that count? It was only about algorithms, however, not hardware.Mechcozmo said:
Historically, there have been base-10 computers, particularly mechanical ones, and computers with word sizes that were not multiples of 2, although you don't see them around much anymore. Survival of the fittest.
For his landmark book series The Art of Computer Programming, Donald Knuth invented a mythical computer named MIX (model number 1009 based on the interpretation of M I X as roman numerals). The MIX machine is programmed in assembly language and emulators have been written for all types of real computers. The remarkable thing about MIX is that the machine can be either binary or decimal, and the programmer doesn't know or care! In other words, an assembly language program is written that will run properly whether the program is run on a base 2 implementation or on a base 10 implementation. Ternary (base 3) implementations are even possible!
John Atanasoff gets some of the credit for realizing that computers would best operate in base 2. Remembering the 1937 project where he designed one of the first electronic computers on a cocktail napkin, he said "It was at an evening of bourbon and 100 mph car rides when the concept came, for an electronically operated machine, that would use base-two (binary) numbers instead of the traditional base-10 numbers, condensers for memory, and a regenerative process to preclude loss of memory from electrical failure."
So perhaps we're all using binary computers only because of a drunken speeder's fantasties!
Doctor Q said:I wrote a paper on three-valued logic for a math course - does that count? It was only about algorithms, however, not hardware.
Historically, there have been base-10 computers, particularly mechanical ones, and computers with word sizes that were not multiples of 2, although you don't see them around much anymore. Survival of the fittest.
For his landmark book series The Art of Computer Programming, Donald Knuth invented a mythical computer named MIX (model number 1009 based on the interpretation of M I X as roman numerals). The MIX machine is programmed in assembly language and emulators have been written for all types of real computers. The remarkable thing about MIX is that the machine can be either binary or decimal, and the programmer doesn't know or care! In other words, an assembly language program is written that will run properly whether the program is run on a base 2 implementation or on a base 10 implementation. Ternary (base 3) implementations are even possible!
John Atanasoff gets some of the credit for realizing that computers would best operate in base 2. Remembering the 1937 project where he designed one of the first electronic computers on a cocktail napkin, he said "It was at an evening of bourbon and 100 mph car rides when the concept came, for an electronically operated machine, that would use base-two (binary) numbers instead of the traditional base-10 numbers, condensers for memory, and a regenerative process to preclude loss of memory from electrical failure."
So perhaps we're all using binary computers only because of a drunken speeder's fantasties!
You learn something new every day... amazing information!
