Discovery May Help Decipher Ancient Inca String Code (nationalgeographic.com) 40
A discovery made in a remote mountain village high in the Peruvian Andes suggests that the ancient Inca used accounting devices made of knotted, colored strings for more than accounting. From a report on National Geographic: The devices, called khipus (pronounced kee-poos), used combinations of knots to represent numbers and were used to inventory stores of corn, beans, and other provisions. Spanish accounts from colonial times claim that Inca khipus also encoded history, biographies, and letters, but researchers have yet to decipher any non-numerical meaning in the cords and knots. Now a pair of khipus protected by Andean elders since colonial times may offer fresh clues for understanding how more elaborate versions of the devices could have stored and relayed information. "What we found is a series of complex color combinations between the cords," says Sabine Hyland, professor of anthropology at University of St Andrews in Scotland and a National Geographic Explorer. "The cords have 14 different colors that allow for 95 unique cord patterns. That number is within the range of symbols in logosyllabic writing systems." Hyland theorizes that specific combinations of colored strings and knots may have represented syllables or words.
Did someone say string... (Score:1)
Not this again (Score:5, Funny)
Look, for the last time - it's not "ancient Incan code".
It's just very well-obfuscated perl.
Re: (Score:2)
That made me LOL! I'm tempted to make this my new .sig.. ;-)
Re: (Score:3, Funny)
Same thing. Every string parses as valid code in Perl. Now whether it's "useful" code is another matter ;-)
Re:Not this again [running random strings in Perl] (Score:1)
I was mostly joking, as the emoticon apparently failed to show. Still, Perl is very "flexible" that way compared to most languages.
Put another way, if a hyper toddler or an angry President randomly bashed around the keyboard, the probability of the results "running" without explicit errors are probably higher in Perl than other common languages.
I've heard this called the "angry monkey metric" by some.
University of St Andrews (Score:1)
When I went there we spelled it correctly. Surprisingly the fault of the article rather than /. editors.
Re: University of St Andrews (Score:1)
Hah, nice.
What comes round (Score:1)
It does however put a new spin on the term spaghetti code.
We should start counting like the Inca (Score:1)
They learned all their smarts from the aliens, we're better off ditching base 10 and moving to base 95.
Fund my Kickstarter for a new type of keyboard! (Score:3)
Set your decoder ring to B-2! (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
Be sure to drink your Ovaltine!
I was gonna bet on "Never gonna give you up..."
String Decoding (Score:1)
Re: (Score:1)
But 95 characters is still more than we get here :O
It says... (Score:2)
So you are telling us... (Score:5, Funny)
That the Inca came up with string theory?
Re: (Score:2)
Wish I had mod points today.
+1 Funny
Re: (Score:2)
Gaaaaah, beat me to it.
Re: (Score:2)
Bar Codes (Score:1)
They were using multi-color bar codes. Cool.
Pfsh (Score:2)
Can you do math on strings? (Score:2)
Kinda Disappointed (Score:2)
This seems like a remarkable discovery; a writing system that combines sight with touch. I'd have thought there'd be more of a discussion, not lame jokes about Perl. I mean, imagine combing written English with Brail. You could double the information density on the page, just for starters. I don't know what else could be achieved with such a system, but I imagine you'd have even richer ways of writing than we do now.
Color me skeptical (Score:2)
The photographs of the colored khipus show individual strings as being differently colored, rather than individual knots, or bands on the strings. If the strings were read one at a time (as opposed to trying to line up knots across different strings), this would imply the colors could only be distinctive at the higher (perhaps sentence) level, which means that they could not be used to form logograms. Or maybe the colors could stand for some "thing", so a red strand might be for potatoes, a blue strand fo
Paging Dirk Pitt.. (Score:1)
"Inca Gold" apparently wasn't on the researchers reading list.