On Thursday 18 July 2002 9:14 pm, Seth Kurtzberg wrote:
[...]
|
|  Computers using number bases other than 2 have been "coming soon" for well
|  over 25 years.  I suppose it is possible that it will happen, but all the
|  work, even the esoteric stuff like quantum computing, is implicitly base 2
|  technology.

When I was studing in University, we had computer doing calculations at base 
of 3.
It was not production machine, and rather promitive, but my pint is - such 
computers exist!

As about optimal base - AFAIK system with 'e' as a base (2.78...) is an 
optimal, in terms of entropy of informatioin.
3 is more close to 'e' than 2, so it makes sense to move to base 3 system.

|
|  On Thursday 18 July 2002 05:15 am, Nicolas Goutte wrote:
|  > How do you get the computed values back in the computer in 60 years?
|  > (Whatever a computer might be or look like in 60 years.)
|  >
|  > Be careful that in 60 years the computers will perhaps not work on base
|  > 2 anymore and that the floating point specifications will perhaps have
|  > changed too. So if you calculate the values back, you will have other
|  > rounding errors. I think that this behaviour is not acceptable for at
|  > least some kinds of documents.
|  >
|  > And I suppose that using paper is not acceptable. If the Federal
|  > Republic of Germany is pushing forward common document formats, I think
|  > that it is also to lessen the use of paper and microfiches for
|  > archiving.
|  >
|  > Have a nice day/evening/night!
|  >
|  > On Donnerstag, 18. Juli 2002 11:08, Seth Kurtzberg wrote:

-- 

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