From: Ka-Ping Yee (pingster@ilm.com)
Date: Mon Jun 26 2000 - 11:20:50 PDT
On Mon, 26 Jun 2000, Dave Long wrote:
>
> The suan-pan (chinese abacus) differs from the soroban (the
> japanese version) in having 5 ones beads and 2 fives beads,
> instead of just 4 ones beads and 1 fives bead.
>
> Is it possible the extra beads serve an equivalent purpose
> to the '2' in skew binary?
Yes, i'm pretty sure this is right -- it's a carry optimization
(at least the way i understood it when my grandfather presented
the abacus to me).
-- ?!ng
This archive was generated by hypermail 2b29 : Mon Jun 26 2000 - 11:26:37 PDT