this post was submitted on 08 Sep 2023
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Standardization
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Binary is really good for signal processing, because you need to worry about two distinct states. Could be two voltages, two currents, two frequencies, two anything. If you use base n in your system, you would need to make sure those n states are pretty much guaranteed to be separate at all times, and that’s surprisingly difficult. Binary is very wasteful, but it is also very robust.
If your numbers need to exist on paper, then binary isn’t a very appealing option. If you’re limited by the space on your golden paper, then base million or something like that would be ideal. If you’re limited by human brain capacity to learn digits, then binary would be great, base 10 is ok, base 20 might be kinda pushing it and base million is out of the question.