
The Binary System Was Created Before Leibniz - rayascott
https://m.cacm.acm.org/blogs/blog-cacm/221749-the-binary-system-was-created-long-before-leibniz/fulltext
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dom0
> 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.

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

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

~~~
theoh
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](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/De_Bruijn_sequence)

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Jill_the_Pill
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.

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mioelnir
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.

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amelius
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-...](https://voyager.jpl.nasa.gov/galleries/images-on-the-golden-
record/)

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

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TrinaryWorksToo
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.

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labster
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.

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dvt
Clearly, you didn't read the article. It's about binary _number_ systems, not
binary _planetary_ systems.

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

[https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/I_Ching](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/I_Ching)

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

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

~~~
theoh
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.

