I just put 24 cookies in the oven. (Ghirardelli Coffee Dark Chocolate Chip cookies.) Cookies are generally counted in dozens, so 24 is 2 dozen + 4 aka twenty eight.
For those of you who don’t deal with non-base-10 number systems, this can be confusing. The digits work the same way base-10 digits do. The value of the placement is just in a different power. Binary 1010 is 1 * 2^3 + 0 * 2^2 + 1 * 2^1 + 0 * 2^0 aka ten.
I’m being somewhat facetious, but cookies are generally counted in dozens, so it makes sense, even if we don’t usually count them in base-12.
One example that most people are aware of is “K”. 1 kilometer is 1000 meters. 1 kilobyte is 1024 bytes – and 1 kilobyte is not a chiliad of bytes. A chiliad is X^3 so base-10 “K” is a chiliad but base-2 “K” is not (it’s 2^10).
Why am I bothering the world (or my six readers) with this? Because the System in my book runs in base-12, just to be different.
In LitRPG, special things happen at specific points. For example, you can pick a class when you hit level 10 or you get a bonus for hitting 100 points in some attribute. It’s _always_ at the 10 or 10/2 number.
It’s always struck me as odd than an alien AI with the power to reinvent a universe just happens to operate in base-10. I decided to go with base-12.
The trick: Everything is _displayed_ in base-10, so figuring out that the system itself is running on base-12 is going to be an important revelation (in book two).
I learned the word “chiliad” figuring this out. English has dozen (12^1), gross (12^2), and myriad (12^4), but we don’t have a word for 12^3. The generic word for X^3 is “chiliad”. 12^3 is 1,728 (in base-10; 1000 in base-12, of course).
Another example from the real world: Because binary is so annoying to deal with, people aggregated it into higher powers rather quickly. Base-16 (hexadecimal) became the most common when 8-bit bytes became standard (yes, bytes used to come in various bit-widths). This creates a counting problem: 0,1,2,3,4,5,6,7,8,9, what? We need single digit ten, eleven, twelve, thirteen, fourteen, and fifteen. Alphabet to the rescue! 1A6C is 1 * 16^3 + 10 * 16^2 + 6 * 16^1 + 12. In base 10. Written in-base, expanding it is 1 * 10^3 + A * 10^2 + 6 * 10^1 + C.
Note that the words don’t change; only the values of the digits do. 14 base-16 is still twenty, not fourteen. 1A can be read as “one eh” but it is still twenty six.
I used to be able to do hexadecimal arithmetic (except division) in my head. I’m not sure I could even do it on paper, these days. The “programmer” setting on calculators has long since taken over that task.
I’m going to use A and B for ten and eleven in base-12. Luke is going to get indignant that the system doesn’t have its own characters. That will be a mistake.
