Unary Numeral System

(written by lawrence krubner, however indented passages are often quotes). You can contact lawrence at: lawrence@krubner.com, or follow me on Twitter.

Interesting:

Addition and subtraction are particularly simple in the unary system, as they involve little more than string concatenation. The Hamming weight or population count operation that counts the number of nonzero bits in a sequence of binary values may also be interpreted as a conversion from unary to binary numbers. However, multiplication is more cumbersome and has often been used as a test case for the design of Turing machines.

Compared to standard positional numeral systems, the unary system is inconvenient and hence is not used in practice for large calculations. It occurs in some decision problem descriptions in theoretical computer science (e.g. some P-complete problems), where it is used to “artificially” decrease the run-time or space requirements of a problem. For instance, the problem of integer factorization is suspected to require more than a polynomial function of the length of the input as run-time if the input is given in binary, but it only needs linear runtime if the input is presented in unary

Post external references

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    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unary_numeral_system
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