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Counting in Hex

January 23, 2017

By Scott

#Counting in hex We all know how to count to 10; why, because we have ten fingers! So passé! Now that our fingers can touch keyboards and numpads have finally fallen out of fashion we should be counting to 16.
##Naming One of the first things I realized is that you can’t repurpose “ten” the word to refer to 10 the numerals in base 16, this quickly gets very confusing as the concept of 10 is so deeply ingrained. It’s a lot easier if 10 remains ten, so that if you happen to slip back into base 10 to do a calculation the meanings of words don’t depend on context. This then means we need new names for common sequences that clearly identify that we are in base 16. At first I replaced t everywhere with h or hex or x, but it didn’t always work, so eventually I made the transition of x to z and then it works better and is pretty easy to pronounce and is more than a little hilarious and makes you sound a bit like Bilbo saying how old he is. This swap will give you the following list of terms:

Multiplying

Now we get to learn our number tables all over again, many of the simple tricks we learn in high school for base ten carry over directly since they are generic properties of any position based number representation.

Since, I’ve often used hex for bit patterns, I thought multiplying by 2 might be easier if you think of it in base 2, and that does seem to be the case,

but still won’t help you calculate at speed in your head, you need to memorize some tables.

##Common big numbers