Over the last two days I’ve written about a way of viewing words, sentences, even entire books, as single (very large) numbers. We do that by treating the characters in the string as “digits” in a number system we define. Technically speaking, we interpret the string as a number written in some large radix.

This is actually what we do every time we look at a written number. For example, we interpret the four-character text string “2013” as representing the numeric value two-thousand-and-thirteen. We do this easily, because we’ve grown up with the base 10 number system, decimal.  The systems I’ve written about simply extend the concept.

Today, as a Sideband, I thought I’d get into some of the more technical details.

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