bah

[jazzfish]

would have posted this last night, but my network card seems to be being flaky. or maybe it's the network in general. anyway.

i feel like banging my head against something, because i am a great fool. _riven_ is bloody brilliant.
and i can't really describe this without spoilers. in a nutshell: five is very important in riven. important enough to be the basis of their number system. essentially, the problem was that i was looking at the numeral for "five" and thinking "five", not "one and zero." so when i got to ten ("two and zero") i was completely lost.
duh.

Comments

[vond.livejournal.com]

In general you and Adam are better at those games than I am - but I'd like to think I might have gotten that one right off, or at least not been lost :) Ross continually complains about how many times you have to learn and re-learn binary, octal, and hex in the CS curriculum, but it does force you to open your mind.

Riven numbers

[jazzfish]

It wouldn't have been so bad, except that... hrm.
Okay. The way it works, you have four distinct symbols for 1-4 (empty space for the zero symbol). To represent the fives digit you take the symbol for 1-4, rotate it 90 degrees, and combine it with the symbol for the ones digit. The problem was that the symbol for one was a vertical line, so the symbol for five was a horizontal line, which didn't immediately trigger the "Oh, that's the symbol for 'one'" response. The order in which I found things did me in-- I realised "Oh, that's a horizontal line meaning 'add five'" and then assumed that the designers were lazy and including a base-ten system with only five digits plus the inclusion of the line.
Conclusion: Riven is smarter than I'd thought at first. This is good. :)