The Binary System Was Created Before Leibniz | Hacker News Reader

The Binary System Was Created Before Leibniz

m.cacm.acm.org

48 pointsrayascott18 comments

> Shirley rejects Leibniz as the first creator of the binary system.

I think the idea of single-source attribution of relatively simple concepts is plain stupid. Any number of people could have made this up in a wide array of circumstances and for a similarly wide array of circumstances we may never know about it. For somewhat similar reasons a lower bar for patents has been established.

This is how I've always felt about De Morgan's obvious, obvious Laws.

Then there is also https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pingala who is not even mentioned in the article. Whats up with that?

Good point, but was Pingala actually using the binary elements as digits? I don't know but it seems possible that he didn't do place value arithmetic with binary strings.

I previously associated his work with "prosodic enumerations" like this: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/De_Bruijn_sequence

This is really interesting, thanks for sharing. I've never heard of Pingala before.

I've read that it may have had origins in African divination systems -- or at least that binary arithmetic was in use from West (Ife) to North (Egypt) Africa for centuries before Leibniz. (Eglash, R. 'African Influences in Cybernetics." In C.H. Gray (ed) The Cyborg Handbook. ) Eglash connected Leibniz to that African tradition via his interest in geomancy.

This article lost me after just the first couple of paragraphs. If Leibniz is, as quoted in the text, `recognized for first formally proposing` the binary system - then what relevance does it have that someone had the idea earlier (and thought it was useless)? He is not recognized for having had the idea first, he is recognized for seeing an application of it and formally proposing and specifying it.

Roentgen wasn't the first to observe x-rays either, he was the first to perform extensive studies and publications on them.

Binary numbers are written on the phonograph records sent with the Voyager spacecraft [1]. Perhaps twisted logic but if it's so universal that aliens can understand it, then I suppose other people than Leibniz could have invented it.

[1] https://voyager.jpl.nasa.gov/galleries/images-on-the-golden-...

Unless the aliens are taken with trinary logic, because they have 3 digits or what not. Their computers could be ternary based.

Then they'd only use the 0th and 1st positions in their number system, which would spread out the data, but as it's compressed or encoded it would still be readable. If you've ever opened a utf-8 document in a utf-16 file reader, you'll see the letters are spread out, but still readable. It's the same idea.

Unless he was an alien.

Pluto and Charon alone were created billions of years before Leibniz, and many binary systems are even older. Not sure why this is a surprise to anyone.

Clearly, you didn't read the article. It's about binary number systems, not binary planetary systems.

the I ching: yin(0) and yang(1); 1000BC

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/I_Ching

If I remember a lecture from decades ago rightly, Liebnitz encountered and became interested in the I Ching, beginning his interested in binary numbers.

Yes, but I think we're talking specifically about positional numbers using binary digits.

The I ching works like a binary look up table

You divine a series of yins and yangs, usually 3 or 6.. trigrams and hexgrams (o).. then look up that sequence in the text to discover it's meaning

010010 references one, whereas 000100 references another

I guess you could argue it's more Shannon than leibniz

(o) https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/I_Ching#Hexagrams

Yeah, but do you ever perform an operation on two hexagrams (addition, multiplication)?

If not, each hexagram is just a bitstring, not a number in binary notation. If not used as numbers they don't count as numbers.

Words written with the standard English alphabet are not base-26 numbers until someone decides to interpret them as such. Dictionaries are lookup tables but the ordering is lexical not numerical. Maybe we are in agreement.

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