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I dont know if im the only one, but at the moment im trying to get into the habbit of dividing binary, in a more binary way.


For some reason, i convert it to decimal in my head, and do the math in decimal, then convert the result to binary.

I know this is cheating, but does anyone else do this?

For manual calculations, it's always long division whenever the arguments happen not to be part of your brain's lookup table. It works the same for decimal, binary, octal, and whatever number range you want to perform - it just becomes simpler for smaller digits and is really straightforward in the binary case. It also works for decimal numbers if you know the caveats.

Plus, if you have one of those unlucky RISC architectures where there's no native multiply or divide, long division is exactly the algorithm you will be using to compute the answer.

If you lack pen and paper, converting to decimal and back does seem to be much more memory efficient and less error-prone for most people, as the brain can only have so many symbols live. dealing with 5-digit decimals easily beats dealing with the relatively huge 16 digit binary strings you need to represent a similar range of numbers in those cases.

Combuster wrote:It works the same for decimal, binary, octal, and whatever number range you want to perform - it just becomes simpler for smaller digits and is really straightforward in the binary case. It also works for decimal numbers if you know the caveats.

Combuster wrote: converting to decimal and back does seem to be much more memory efficient and less error-prone for most people

Thanks

I don't find this a useful skill to develop. I never find myself in the need to perform fast binary divisions and even if I ever did, I'd probably be in front of a computer.

Love4Boobies wrote:I don't find this a useful skill to develop. I never find myself in the need to perform fast binary divisions and even if I ever did, I'd probably be in front of a computer.

Good point.

Intel used to have a great barrel shift which was used to divide and multiply....

moo.