Wikipedia:Articles for deletion/Radix economy


 * The following discussion is an archived debate of the proposed deletion of the article below. Please do not modify it. Subsequent comments should be made on the appropriate discussion page (such as the article's talk page or in a deletion review).  No further edits should be made to this page.

The result was Keep Cena rium  Talk  17:37, 31 August 2008 (UTC)

Radix economy

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Original research. The article's only reference is to everything2, which is unreliable; the phrase "radix economy" gets no hits on Google books or scholar, so verification is unlikely. I also doubt the article's premise, that the cost of a single digit is directly proportional to the radix. This article should be deleted and references to it removed (not just unlinked). Melchoir (talk) 18:06, 23 August 2008 (UTC)
 * Comment The article is not exactly original research; there is quite a popular meme about 3 (really, e) being the "most efficient" base, though I've never seen a proper argument for why one would compute efficiency in the way suggested. I've added a link to a magazine column (not a peer-reviewed work) about the topic; maybe someone can salvage the article. Hqb (talk) 19:11, 23 August 2008 (UTC)
 * Now that's interesting... at one point the author writes, "This special property of base 3 attracted the notice of early computer designers. On the hypothesis that a computer's component count would be roughly proportional both to the width and to the depth of the numbers being processed, they suggested that rw might be a good predictor of hardware cost, and so ternary notation would make the most efficient use of hardware resources. The earliest published discussion of this idea I've been able to find appears in the 1950 book High-speed Computing Devices, a survey of computer technologies compiled on behalf of the U.S. Navy by the staff of Engineering Research Associates." So there might be theoretical underpinnings after all, depending on how that hypothesis was reached. I'm far from being sold, but in that case I think it would be better to present such information in a History section of Ternary numeral system or Ternary computer. It's too much to give rw its own name and article. Melchoir (talk) 19:57, 23 August 2008 (UTC)
 * Merge and redirect to Ternary computer. The content can be sourced with the American Scientist article. I can't find a source for the term "radix economy", though -- perhaps it would be better to rewrite the content from scratch and then delete this (since we can't delete-and-merge). I'd be inclined to keep this around as a harmless redirect. --N Shar (talk · contribs) 00:45, 24 August 2008 (UTC)
 * Keep. This looks like one of those cases where the needed improvement in the article happens just after it's nominated for deletion, and then there's no longer a reason to delete.  The proposed  reason for deletion was original research.  So someone called our attention to the fact that it was published in 2001 and linked to the article.  I'm inclined to say this should NOT get merged into ternary computer.  There are lots of issues related to ternary computers other than this mathematical idea, which can be understood simply on its own, and I can imagine it having relevance to some topics other than ternary computers, in Shannon's information theory. Michael Hardy (talk) 15:41, 24 August 2008 (UTC)
 * Merge with section redirect into ternary computer; the only reason to make this argument, with its arbitrary choice of costs, is to argue for ternary. Septentrionalis PMAnderson 20:44, 24 August 2008 (UTC)
 * Keep. The subject is of its own interest. Maksim-e (talk) 19:25, 25 August 2008 (UTC)
 * Keep notable subject, sourced, deserves its own article. Application is not just ternary computers; has also been applied to design of telephone menu systems. Gandalf61 (talk) 13:33, 26 August 2008 (UTC)
 * Keep The references provided by the above editors have led me to discover that there is actually a substantial literature on the "optimum radix" or "optimal radix" for a given problem, which goes beyond the simplistic formulation this article started with. I recommend the article be kept, with the understanding that it will include alternative formulations and probably be moved to a more common title. Melchoir (talk) 08:37, 27 August 2008 (UTC)
 * Keep. Notability is clearly established in the current form of the article, and the concepts applicability to more than one field rules out merging. Phil Bridger (talk) 13:51, 30 August 2008 (UTC)


 * The above discussion is preserved as an archive of the debate. Please do not modify it. Subsequent comments should be made on the appropriate discussion page (such as the article's talk page or in a deletion review). No further edits should be made to this page.