Yupana: The Fibonacci number grid-based calculator of the Incas (2019)
mathematicsmagazine.com
mathematicsmagazine.com
I wonder why this article is so convinced they are abacuses.
What's shown would make for very strange terraces. Most Andean terraces run perpendicular to the vertical face. Saddlepoints are much less common, probably because they're small, usually at the wrong altitude, have lots of erosion, and the air dynamics are really weird.
For all we know these 'devices' were ancient board games who's sole purpose was entertainment!?
I take such claims to mean simply "We have no idea what this artifact is for; it might as well be something magical, for all we know".
>”It is the year 4022; all of the ancient country of Usa has been buried under many feet of detritus from a catastrophe that occurred back in 1985. Imagine, then, the excitement that Howard Carson, an amateur archeologist at best, experienced when in crossing the perimeter of an abandoned excavation site he felt the ground give way beneath him and found himself at the bottom of a shaft, which, judging from the DO NOT DISTURB sign hanging from an archaic doorknob, was clearly the entrance to a still-sealed burial chamber.
Carson's incredible discoveries, including the remains of two bodies, one of then on a ceremonial bed facing an altar that appeared to be a means of communicating with the Gods and the other lying in a porcelain sarcophagus in the Inner Chamber, permitted him to piece together the whole fabric of that extraordinary civilization.”
Its natural, because games based on chance give us the feeling of being "hot" or "cold" ie able or unable to predict entropy.
MMI is a burgeoning science but if you're curious there is a group out there with access to QRNGs that practice influencing probabilities. And there is a small, but measurable effect size. And even not so small in some experiments I have personally seen, but being funded by Rockefellers means keeping your nose pointed away from the control grid.
https://www.sciencenews.org/article/ancient-toys-kids-archae...
https://www.bbc.com/future/article/20220816-the-worlds-oldes...
There's a lot of guesswork involved in the field, I would think?
> article: To this day, it is unknown how the Incas worked with these calculators. There are several hypotheses about their use [...]
It appears, that there are people who have formed hypotheses, but apparently no consensus...
---
> article: The mysterious tablets were apparently suitable for all four basic arithmetic operations: addition, subtraction, multiplication, and division.
Many objects are suitable for numeric calculation (technically any object), just looking around my room I see a cupcake pan and a chess board -- the chess board being a little more useful for doing 8-bit binary arithmetic, but if I combine it with the cupcake pan I can add a dedicated shift register which makes mult/div a bit easier :)
--- Your continued quote from above:
> [...] especially considering they can directly link the word to the meaning "count".
Yes, because as we all know - words in any given language only have a single meaning! 8P
> Do you always just assume science is wrong?
Last time I checked; jumping to a conclusion using a minimum of evidence isn't scientific.
It's somewhat ironic that you throw around a speculation that everything is speculated without actually trying to look at the possible evidence yourself.
I did not read any of the cited articles!
> There might be a lot of detail on the evidence in the cited articles which are just not mentioned here.
I'm sure there is, but the linked article gave me no impetuous to read them; nor any guidance as to the most efficient order of consumption.
> It's somewhat ironic that you throw around a speculation that everything is speculated without actually trying to look at the possible evidence yourself.
something, something, Cunningham's Law