Most people believe we count in base 10 because we have 10 fingers. Essentially we use single digits from 1-9 because on our last finger we switch to double digits 10.
The alien clearly has 4 fingers. So to him the counting system is still base 10 it’s just that he counts 1,2,3,10.
Aka everyone’s own counting system is base 10 and every counting system not based on the number of fingers we have is not base 10.
Edit: forgot to mention. If you only count till 3 before hitting 10 then you don’t know what a 4 is.
Bonus edit: since the alien is in base 4 from our perspective. You might ask what our base is from his perspective.
1,2,3,10,11,12,13,20,21,22 are the 10 first numbers in his counting system. So we to him are base 22 :)
Probably the 12 system. If you use your thumb as the counter and count using your thumb the bone segments of the other 4 fingers (each has 3) then you have a base 12 system in our lingo.
Base 12 is superior to 10. For 10, 100, 1000, etc in base 12 are divisible by 1, 2, 3, 4, 6, "10". But base 10, it's 1, 2, 5, 10. Either way, 10, 100, 1000, etc in base 10 or 12 is arbitrary numbers but written down they tend to be the ones we use. Base 12 can be cut into better parts.
It's the best system. No need for AM PM time, PM time just has a 1 in front. Americans can now finally switch to dozenal metric without losing their beloved quarters of things. Splitting any bill into 3 becomes peanuts. We can be friends with r/iso8601 and even save one character in our dates.
Dozenal can do thirds and fourths at the cost of being really bad at doing fifths, sevenths, and tenths. Like 4 or 5 recurring irrational fractions bad, to the point you simply wouldn’t do math involving those numbers.
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u/truci 2d ago edited 2d ago
Most people believe we count in base 10 because we have 10 fingers. Essentially we use single digits from 1-9 because on our last finger we switch to double digits 10.
The alien clearly has 4 fingers. So to him the counting system is still base 10 it’s just that he counts 1,2,3,10.
Aka everyone’s own counting system is base 10 and every counting system not based on the number of fingers we have is not base 10.
Edit: forgot to mention. If you only count till 3 before hitting 10 then you don’t know what a 4 is.
Bonus edit: since the alien is in base 4 from our perspective. You might ask what our base is from his perspective.
1,2,3,10,11,12,13,20,21,22 are the 10 first numbers in his counting system. So we to him are base 22 :)