Factorio Forums

Ohlmann wrote:

torham wrote:I am sure that nowadays the ^2 system is the basis of the arithmetic in the schools

it should be.

base ten is a stupid system when everything we do is in base 2, and is only converted to base 10, because us stupid humans understand it 'better'.

kinda like imperial in the USA. stupid.

Really?

I dont see any advantage in multiplying decimal 8 * 10 to binary 1000 * 1010. And with large numbers this gets really stupid.

decimal: 4984 * 29127 = 145168968

binary: 1001101111000 * 111000111000111 = 1000101001110001101001001000

I would kill every teacher, which forces me to write such long numbers.

pbhead wrote:base ten is a stupid system when everything we do is in base 2, and is only converted to base 10, because us stupid humans understand it 'better'.

Oh, I have missed something.

btw. after all the complains about the new y*10^x stacksizes I saw no post that suggests the complete conversion from decimal into binary or hexadecimal. I mean I expected at least one post if so many people love their "0's" and "1's"...

pbhead wrote: base ten is a stupid system when everything we do is in base 2, and is only converted to base 10, because us stupid humans understand it 'better'.

Since when we do anything in base 2 on a common basis ? That's only for thoses who deal with drivers or who realize processors. They are highly qualified but very few of them are needed.

The base 10 have an enormous advantage : the base is big enough to keep number short enough, but small enough to remember all digits easily. Other good options would be base 11 (primer number, useful for fractions) or 12 (because it's easily to divide by 2 and 3)

The story of the base systems is quite interesting. For example the octal: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Octal

8 is also nice to calculate, some say a bit better like decimals. Babylonian had base 12.

But non ever came to the idea to use base 2 for numerations or calculations.

ssilk wrote:But non ever came to the idea to use base 2 for numerations or calculations.

Well, someone did. Otherwise we wouldn't have binary or functional computers today

It just didn't become the mainstream standard.

The change to green, red, blue circuit boards is going to get some getting used to. And the new inserter colors are too close to one another, I feel. The original colors made the different inserter types stand more apart from each other. And speaking of colors, the new copper plates now look like slabs of meat now, for some reason, lol. I guess that's another thing I will just have to get used to. Ah well, sorry for the tangent!

Not counting some issues with trains my only complaint is the lack of unity between colors, as it seems a bit random now. Science packs go Red, Green, Blue, Purple in order of difficulty, while electronics go Green, Red, Blue, Belts go Yellow, Red, Blue, and inserters and other things also vary randomly. I feel like color coding should be in order of power with one or two colors set aside for unique attributes for example smart inserters and long-arm inserters.

Ohlmann wrote:

pbhead wrote: base ten is a stupid system when everything we do is in base 2, and is only converted to base 10, because us stupid humans understand it 'better'.

Since when we do anything in base 2 on a common basis ? That's only for thoses who deal with drivers or who realize processors. They are highly qualified but very few of them are needed.

The base 10 have an enormous advantage : the base is big enough to keep number short enough, but small enough to remember all digits easily. Other good options would be base 11 (primer number, useful for fractions) or 12 (because it's easily to divide by 2 and 3)

Since when do we do anything in base 2?!?!?

Your computer probably did more calculations in base 2 during the time over which you wrote that post than you have and will ever do in base 10 in your entire life!

Id wager that >99.9% of all calculations on this planet are done in base 2.

and yes, writing things out in binary would be kinda annoying and hard to read, thankfully, we have a shorthand, its called hexadecimal (base 16).

converting from hexadecimal to binary and back again is so amazingly easy it is not even funny.

It's kinda pointless to argue that a computer does calculations in base 2 when this thread is about calculations done by humans. Your computer won't care if stacks are base 2 or base 10. People, on the other hand, are the fastest in base 10 since it's the most commonly used system for counting, money transactions and other things done on daily basis.

(The gesture is NOT meant offensive in any point)

pbhead wrote:
Since when do we do anything in base 2?!?!?

Your computer probably did more calculations in base 2 during the time over which you wrote that post than you have and will ever do in base 10 in your entire life!

Id wager that >99.9% of all calculations on this planet are done in base 2.

and yes, writing things out in binary would be kinda annoying and hard to read, thankfully, we have a shorthand, its called hexadecimal (base 16).

converting from hexadecimal to binary and back again is so amazingly easy it is not even funny.

Excellent. Well since you are so proficient with numbers and calculations in various base systems including hexa, it should be no problem for you to adapt to the new decimal stacks. I don't even know why you seem upset about the whole thing.

Rahjital wrote:It's kinda pointless to argue that a computer does calculations in base 2 when this thread is about calculations done by humans. Your computer won't care if stacks are base 2 or base 10. People, on the other hand, are the fastest in base 10 since it's the most commonly used system for counting, money transactions and other things done on daily basis.

Not sure if it helps or hurts the arguement, but I do daily things in base 2... like chewing food...

I also used to get 2-dollar bills from the bank every so often. It confused a lot of cashiers who had to call over their managers.

starxplor wrote:Not sure if it helps or hurts the arguement, but I do daily things in base 2... like chewing food...

I also used to get 2-dollar bills from the bank every so often. It confused a lot of cashiers who had to call over their managers.

You're just odd

I can't believe this topic is still going...lol..

I'm a computer programmer both by profession and as a hobbyist and have been doing it for about 17 years or nearly 2/3'rds of my life so base2 is quite familiar to me.
Reading this thread it seems like pretty much all the complaints against base10 stack sizes boil down to people not liking the fact that stacks aren't exactly dividable by two.

I've never really seen a particular reason where I would have missed the ability to divide things exactly. Vast majority of the time I don't have full stacks of items in my inventory anyway so it doesn't matter how large the stack can be in the first place.

Someone mentioned earlier they needed to divide coal between 8 boilers. I'd like to know what is so bad about it if some boiler gets more or less coal than others? I would assume the person would try to get it automated ASAP anyway or at least go find some more fuel to insert there. Assuming this is early-game it's also more than likely that the player does not have a full stack of coal anyway. Not to mention it takes special planning to have 2^x inventories to split things between of.


TL:DR - seems like it's a problem only for OCD people but they can only come up with highly improbable scenarios where the stack size change would make any sense

Gammro wrote:

ssilk wrote:But non ever came to the idea to use base 2 for numerations or calculations.

Well, someone did. Otherwise we wouldn't have binary or functional computers today

Binary is used in computers only because it's significantly harder to implement anything else.

Though Intel did come up with tri-state transistor used inside their CPUs not too long ago so I guess for some parts they use ternary system

Unless base two has a significant advantage on filesize / RAM (such that 256 different values can be stored in a single byte only, rather than the 4(?) bytes of an unsigned int ranging up to almost 4.2 billion - so stack sizes won't really matter, since most players probably have yet to harvest 4.2 billion ores), I'd go with base ten, since everyone learns base ten in primary school. Yes, I do have a computer science background, and I'm fond of base two (binary watch, anyone?), but base ten is still easier on the eyes.

Summing up: If it helps performance, choose base 2. If it doesn't (and I think it doesn't, since it was quite easy for devs to edit the stacksize), I'd go with base 10.

EDI wrote:Summing up: If it helps performance, choose base 2. If it doesn't (and I think it doesn't, since it was quite easy for devs to edit the stacksize), I'd go with base 10.

Fun fact:
performance-wise full register-sized variables (4 or 8 bytes on 32 or 64bit CPUs respectively) are generally faster to process than smaller ones. Only place where smaller-sized variables could be faster are in SIMD calculations but I'm almost certain those aren't used in Factorio.

Also using smaller variables could make getting data from RAM to cache/registers faster due to less cache misses but I would assume that active working set for average Factorio playthrough is minuscule and can fit entirely to cache on most CPUs.

I'm also almost certain that stack size was already stored as 4 byte integer and original stack size limitation of 256 was just a cosmetic choice.

Only place where optimizing for smaller variables could make sense is for network communications but I don't think it would make too big difference there either.


TL:DR
performance-wise there shouldn't be any difference what so ever.

starxplor wrote:Not sure if it helps or hurts the arguement, but I do daily things in base 2... like chewing food...

"Oh no, I forgot how to calculate the chewing position of my mouth, how am I going to eat now?"

"Simple, just repeatedly set the position of your mouth to the inverse bit of what it currently is!"

Ric wrote:I can't believe this topic is still going...lol..

Same here. At first, I avoided commenting here after my initial vote not to incite an argument, but, aside from hoho's educated guesswork, the thread has pretty much devolved into making fun of the issue. Chances are it's going to get a lock soon, much like the piracy thread did.

pbhead wrote:Id wager that >99.9% of all calculations on this planet are done in base 2.

just wrong, cause 100% of all financial calculations are made with decimal numbers. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Binary-coded_decimal

ssilk wrote:

pbhead wrote:Id wager that >99.9% of all calculations on this planet are done in base 2.

just wrong, cause 100% of all financial calculations are made with decimal numbers. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Binary-coded_decimal

Technically not all of the financial calculations are run on Power CPUs that have BCD in hardware so on hardware level most stuff is still done in binary

hoho wrote:

ssilk wrote:

pbhead wrote:Id wager that >99.9% of all calculations on this planet are done in base 2.

just wrong, cause 100% of all financial calculations are made with decimal numbers. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Binary-coded_decimal

Technically not all of the financial calculations are run on Power CPUs that have BCD in hardware so on hardware level most stuff is still done in binary

Technically maybe you should be a lawyer!