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I remember being puzzled by this and many other numbers that kept cropping up. 32, 64, 128, 256, 1024, 2048... Why do programmers and electronic engineers hate round numbers? The other set of numbers that was mysterious was timber and sheet materials. They cut them to 1220 x 2440mm and thicknesses of 18 and 25mm. Are programmers and the timber merchants part of some diabolical conspiracy?
They just do it to look cool in front of their developer friends.
Timber is actually cut in inches. That's why the odd numbers.
32, 64, 128 etc. are all round numbers, counting in binary. They are powers of two. Since computers work in binary, they make logical sense.
1220mm is 4ft, and 18 and 25mm are three-quarters of an inch, and an inch respectively.
They were making a joke. That being said, im not familiar with lumber or imperial<->metric conversions so their second point was lost on me, so thanks.
A previous version of this article said it was "not clear why WhatsApp settled on the oddly specific number." A number of readers have since noted that 256 is one of the most important numbers in computing, since it refers to the number of variations that can be represented by eight switches that have two positions - eight bits, or a byte.
Lol, weird way to say that 256 is a power of two, and computers operate in base two.
It used to be a way bigger deal when computers were very memory scarce, if you needed to say, represent 1024 values, that means you'd use 10 bits or 2 bytes, the remaining 6 bits could be used to store other related information like flags but more often than not it would be waste (unused values that still have to be represented as 0s)
These numbers are pretty arbitrary nowadays but they still show up a lot in computing. They didn't choose 256 so they could represent it in a byte, the real reason is probably that groups larger than 256 can't realistically be managed by users.
That's my 2¢ anyways.
Tbf saying it that way brings a visual metaphor. Simply giving it as a mathematical definition would leave it feeling just as arbitrary.
Shout out to Castlevania II, where you can hold anywhere from 0 to 256 laurels. Yes, you read that right -- 256, not 255. I inspected RAM to double check. It's a 16-bit word on an 8-bit system with a maximum value of 0x100. They could have used 8 bits instead of 16. But no, they really did choose this arbitrary number.
"I inspected RAM to double check."
That's an unhinged level of commitment. Respect — I dig it
Sounds like such a flex move
Maybe they keep some other data in the same space using bitmask?
plausible, but my experience from dissecting these kinds of games is that they tend not to be as space efficient as you'd think they could be if they were the kaze emanuar type. The fact that they opted to have 257 distinct values for the laurels suggests to me that they weren't prioritizing space efficiency.
My best (wildly speculative) guess is that a designer, knowing 256 is a common limit, wasn't thinking carefully and said the maximum value should be 256 (instead of 255), and then an overly pedantic coder implemented this to the letter while rolling their eyes.
Currently in the industry - it's exactly this. It's a communication issue between the programming team and other teams, where designers freely speak for design, artists freely speak for art, etc. but it's much harder for programmers to speak for implementation since it's usually in reference to somebody else's work, and when designers get offended or defensive or dismissive of the non-designer requesting 256 be changed to 255, then it stops being worth it.
For example, we made an absolutely mint UI backend, it was data driven with editors so anyone could whip up a new UI for the next feature without needing programmers. The design team were like "damn, I hear how complicated this thing was to build, so let's make the programmers lives easier by not using it and only asking for simple bespoke stuff". Telling them "the investment has already been paid for so please use it" was tantamount to telling them how to do their job while being ungrateful they had considered us, furthering the communication breakdown.
Yes I'm bitter and tired. It's easier to use a short for 256 instead of arguing to have my opinion considered
Read it in the (old) avgn voice...
Numbers guy here, I can confirm 256 is an evenly specific number, and not an oddly specific number.
Oh you are the numbers guy ? Name every number
I'm going for the boring but practical answer: {x | x ∈ A} and {x | x ∉ A}. Obviously the second set is doing the heavy lifting.
You should know your limits
0, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9
nerd
Ha, got eem
As the numbers guy. Do you remember the name of the site that can tell you the what a given number is often associated with?
Wikipedia often has disambiguation pages for numbers that may be helpful in a search like this (https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/71).
WolframAlpha is good for identifying numerical properties of numbers (https://www.wolframalpha.com/input?i=71).
OEIS has a searchable set of sequences (https://oeis.org/search?q=71&language=english&go=Search)
I fear that none of these is what you're looking for, though. My attempts to find something that sounds like what you want mostly turned up resources on numerology, and at least one article apparently about how the meaning of numbers is radically different between cultures.
That's a super old article as well.
They got rightfully roasted in the comments for not knowing even the most basic things about computing.
I remember thinking something similar when I was a kid modding Starcraft. Max levels/ranks in researching was 256 and I always wondered why such a weirdly specific number.
Still odd, I very much doubt they use a 8bit variable to set this limit. What would this bring ?
When the program is running it's probably stored with 32 or 64 bits, but that probably isn't the case for the network packet layout. I can imagine them wanting to optimize network traffic with over 3 billion users even if it's just a small improvement.
Also TIL that Erlang's VM apparently stores strings as linked lists of chars. Very strange.
Still odd
Actually, it's even.
Yep very weird, should have been 255.
No, you can't have a group of zero, so the counter doesn't need to waste a position counting zero.
0 is reserved for the FBI agent listening in.
In this case the limit was entirely arbitrary.
The programmers were told to pick a limit and they liked 256. There are issues with having a large number of people in a group, but it wasn't a hardware limit for this particular case.
But it's still not oddly specific, they picked a nice round number