Inquiring Authors Inquire

[lagilman]

A question for the programmers and/or practicing magicians out there.... if you were working in a binary magical system, what would be the most powerful numbers after 10? What would be the weakest? Be useful, have a bad guy named after you. :-)

(yes, this really is my life. Until the next project, where I'll be asking about bullet velocity and hot flashes.)

Comments

[kirbyk.livejournal.com]

Powers of 2, ie, 2, 4, 8, 16, 32, 64, 128, 256, 512, 1024, 2048, etc.

These come up again and again. One instance is a measure of size. You've heard of 8-bit, 16-bit, 64-bit systems. On an 8-bit system, you're working with chunks of 8 binary bits, ie 2^8, which is why in the original Zelda you max out at 255 rupees. To hold more would cost twice as much memory, which is often at a premium.

Numbers start at 0 in programming, so an 8-bit system is 0 to 255. 256 would be a 'weak' number, because it's expensive - and if you want it to work this way, maybe it wraps around to 0 again.

[lagilman]

*goes squinty-eyes and thoughtful*


Hrmmm. I hadn't considered that particular angle...oh. hrmmmmm... *goes off on a tangent*

[greatsword.livejournal.com]

I was going to suggest 1023 for similar reasons, being as high as you can represent with the fingers on both hands. One hand would be 31, if that works better for the plot. (Humans are a 10bit system.)

Depends on why you want it to be considered significant, too - 12 would be represented as 10101. 8 and 264 would be represented on the fingers by rather rude gestures...

Yes, I'm enough of a geek to have taught my son to count in binary on his fingers.

[icedrake.livejournal.com]

Your question and kirbyk's comment made me think of short story I read years back, Drumlin Boiler (http://www.contrapositivediary.com/?page_id=2)by Jeff Duntemann. (it's in his Cold Hands collection, though I read it in some anthology).

The underlying idea is that aliens have left a device on the planet that lets you summon things. Anything, in fact. The control mechanism is simple: Two pillars which you hit with a stick, for a total of 256 times. Which one you hit when (essentially whether you put in a 1 or a 0) determines the item that shows up. 2^256 is a very large number indeed -- roughly comparable with the number of atoms in the universe. You end up with quasi-wizards who jealously guard their notebooks of command sequences. Hilarity ensues, of course.

[jesskastar.livejournal.com]

11 and 22 are powerful from a numerology perspective. But after 9, those are the only two numbers since numerology breaks it down until the number is 1-9 or 11/22.

Feng shui operates on 0-9 so that won't help you based on your question (numbers after 10.)

Variants of thirteen have power depending on the person and magical tradition.

12 traditionally also has power: months, years in the chinese horoscope cycle, etc.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/12_(number)
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chinese_zodiac

Finally, and this may be my personal weird brand of magic/science/math but don't forget biorhythm! This uses cycles of 23, 28, and 33 days.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Biorhythm
http://www.medicinenet.com/biorhythms/article.htm

I hope this helps some. It's not necessarily computer-ish such as kirbyk provided.

[jennielf.livejournal.com]

Interestingly, my husband (firmware programmer) said pretty much the same thing, but arguing that 256 and 2048 would be "powerful" numbers because of the exact reasons mentioned above.

Bitwise Operations

[laura williams (from livejournal.com)]

Don't know if this will help you out tangentially, but here's a wiki on binary operations in case you're dealing with any kind of additive/subtractive combinations http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bitwise_operation

[anisosynchronic.livejournal.com]

Binary numbers though go

0 = 0 provided zero exists in the culture/math language--the Romans for example, did not have zero... So, they started numbering at 1. They also used a numbering system which arguably is one of the clumsiest ever invented, with I, II, III, IV, V, VI, VII, VIII, IX, X... etc. Lots of cultures re-used alphabetical letters to to also be number mostly using base 10 (not sure what the Babylonians and such did, they were not using base 10, they're where the base 60 stuff as in seconds and minutes came from... )

1 = 1
10 = 2
11 = 3
100 = 4
101 = 5
111 = 6
111 = 7
1000 = 8
Etc.
naively, however, "Gray codes" could have e.g.

0001 = 1
0011 = 2
0010 = 3
0110 = 4
0100 = 5
1100 = 5
1000 = 6
1001 = 7
1011 = 8
1010 = 9
1110 = 10
1111 = 11
1101 = 12
0101 = 13
0111 = 14
0110 =15

where only one bit changes at a time for plus or minus one.... the advantage to that is that a stray bit flipping, doesn't change the value as much.... that is, in base 16 0111 is 7 and 1000 is eight, in the standard, non-Gray binary encoding. In the standard encoding, if the bit that is 0 for 0111 = 7flips anomalously, suddenly the value changes from 0111 = 7, to 1111 = 15, more than doubling--and that can/does happen, especially in space electronics when stray gamma rays come though. Also, going from 7 to 8 is changing from 0111 to 1000, where all four bits have to correctly change... there are engineering benefits to using Gray codes.

Getting into other stuff, there's two's complement --if encoding negative numbers along positive numbers, and non-negative numbers, that makes a different.... some systems use a 1 on the "big endian" place value to be a 1 to indicate a negative number.

Thinking about binary systems, the analogy is to "On = 1, Off = Zero" -- A binary system might facilitate having zero, as an "off" condition meaning "nothing is there."


Etc.

[rosefox]

I'd go in a different direction and look at palindromic numbers. 11, 101, 111, etc.

I would definitely suggest avoiding anything like "1 is good and 0 is evil".

[equesgal.livejournal.com]

I think I'm having a hot flash... lol