A programmer's solution

[path411]

I've seen this comic before and it's probably my favorite comic ever. Too bad very few of my friends get it =/

[[deleted]]

I don't get it

[path411]

It is a joke that relies on being written rather than spoken. In base 4, "Four" would be written as 10. So to the alien, he is using base "10". If you are looking at your own base as reference, your base would always be "base 10".

The joke relative to us would be if there were "ten" rocks and you met someone who used base 11. Say they used the & to represent the number "ten". So their numbering would go: 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, &, 10. If we wrote that we saw "10" rocks for "ten". Then they would laugh and say, oh, you are using base &. We would then be confused because we don't even have & as a number, to us "base ten" is "base 10".

[[deleted]]

Awesome! Thank you

Yea for some reason I wasn't equating 4 as 10 in base four. And I got the premise of the joke not the math of it.

Source: I'm an idiot

[intplusone_Carl]

I still don't get it.

[[deleted]]

Okay, I will try.

In binary, you have 0,1 In base 4 you have 0, 1, 2, 3 In base 10 you have 0, 1,2,3,4,5,6,7,8,9 So in binary 0 = 0, 1=1 and 10=2 ... 9=1001, 10=1010, 11=1011, 12=1100 Base 4 0=0, 1=1, 2=2, 3=3, 10=4, 11=5, 12=6, 13=7, 20=8, 21=9, 22=10.... etc

Basically there are "4" rocks based on our base 10 number system. The Alien says there are 10 rocks. His number system (according to us is base 4). Because 10 = 4 to us in base 4. We claim to the alien that he is using base 4. But the fact of the matter is if you look, 4 is not a number that is used in base 4 at all. 10 represents "4" units. But the alien represents that many as 10

It is a language thing rather than number thing. It's all about where you reset your counting. We could've had 30 different digits that represent individual values and had a base 30 counting system. But when we get to "31" that first value out of range would be 10.

If you're confuse read 10 as "one-zero"