How to Count to 1296 in Ngkolmpu

[ysabetwordsmith]

So much fun.  :D 

I am reminded of the Cheela invention of counting, which uses a very similar method but ends up in base 12 instead of base 6.

Comments

Re: Yes ...

[conuly]

60 makes sense too - you've got the prime factors of 2, 3, and 5 plus the non-prime factors of 4, 6, 10, 12, 15, and 30. You can count to 60 on your fingers by moving your thumb along the phalanges of one hand (for base 12) and then keeping track of how many times you've done that using the fingers of the other hand - five cycles of twelve makes 60.

Of course, once you invent 0 then you've got to come up with a numerical system that juggles 60 different symbols and it gets a bit unwieldy. Not prohibitively so, but somewhat.