From LOJBAN%CUVMB.BITNET@uga.cc.uga.edu Sat Feb 11 20:36:04 1995 Message-Id: <199502120135.AA20152@nfs2.digex.net> Date: Sat Feb 11 20:36:04 1995 From: Chris Bogart Subject: Re: replies re. ka & mamta be ma >> > Suppose you had to >> > devise a notation for all numbers. [...] One symbol alone will >> > not suffice. I guess some mathematician has worked out how few will >> > suffice. >> Two. It's called binary notation ;) > >Wdn't that just do positive integers? You could put a 0 or 1 at the beginning and by convention let it mean positive or negative. More generally, you could come up with an encoding for all rational numbers using, say the ASCII character set (the irrationals can't be represented with a finite string), then convert the resulting string into binary. But then the 0s and 1s really would be more like "subsymbols" than "symbols", wouldn't they? Determining how many symbols you'd need would depend on how you defined a symbol. (for that matter, you could convert the ascii representation into a single very large number, and put that many 1's in a row, presumably then representing any rational number with a string of 1's -- one symbol only!) ____ Chris Bogart \ / ftp://ftp.csn.org/cbogart/html/homepage.html Quetzal Consulting \/ cbogart@quetzal.com