Talk:Binary number
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Should there be something about binary finger counting in the "Binary Counting" section?
[edit]HI
History?
[edit]Systems built on combining a series of yes/no answers (yin/yang, or whatever) to identify one out of e.g. 16, 64 or 256 options, have a long history. In many cases, the options are placed in a certain order (as chapters in a book, as segments around an edge of something, or whatever). Such systems obviously have a relation with binary numbers, and may (as with I Ching & Leibniz) have played a role in the invention or development of binary numbers.
However, unless the various histioric precedents were actually used to count off objects unrelated to the original contexts (of oracles, poetic metres, or whatever), they hardly deserve to be called numbers. One might simply remove the precedents that were in fact not demonstrably numbers from the article, but I think they are interesting and relevant; I just think we need to be very clear (and I'm not sure we are at the moment) that most of these historic precedents were not "numbers". Nø (talk) 17:44, 20 August 2024 (UTC)