Counting on fingers

[Quailman]

My fifth grade teacher taught us to count beyond ten on our fingers, and I still use it over 30 years later. Simply use the binary system and you can get to 31 on one hand, 1023 on two.

If I'm trying to follow directions that say "turn right at the sixth traffic signal," I would always lose count if I didn't use 3 fingers on one hand to keep track. If reading names aloud off a list, I can track the number with one hand and check the result when I'm finished.

Of course it took a bunch of fifth-graders a while to get past binary four.

[AcidFast]

I used to be a championship dart player, and when we play games of -01 (301, 501, 601), keeping score involves adding up the three darts' totals, and then subtracting it from the current score (starting with 301, 501, or 601, depending on ho wmany people are playing...). Up in New England, we always keep score on a dry-erase board or chalkboard (no electronic scoreboards), so the scorekeeper has got to do it in his head, and quickly, so as not to slow down the game.

I developed an interesting method of doing that math, and I will try to describe it here, because people always had difficulty understanding it, and I would like to know if anyone does math this way:

I would take the score for the turn (after a while, adding up the three darts totals became second nature, and a quick glance at the board would yield the result), and break it down to tens and ones (or hundreds, but that was rare...), and subtract the largest part from the total, and then subtract the smaller part. for example, say your score was 273 before your turn. You throw 2 20's and a 16, that's 56 total, so I would subtract 50 from 273, giving me 223, and then 6 from that, yielding 217. i always did my math that way, and I found that after a while, I was one of the fastest and most accurate scorekeepers on my team. Does anyone else do math the smae way, or is it just a fluke that this method was always easiest for me?

[Sofis]

I count like that, except I don't think 223-6=217, I think 223-6=220-3=217.

[Quailman]

I do that as well, and it seems that I recall a guest on one of the non-sensational TV talk shows quite a while back who demonstrated that method for both addition and subtraction. He believed that we could add faster and more effectively if we went left-to-right instead of right-to-left.

[araya]

one hundred fooooooooorty!

I love darts Acid, but hardly ever get to play. I subtract much like you do.. I round the number off to nearest tens and subtract, then adjust up or down the necessary ones amount. Of course, most of the time my score is 26, which becomes easy to work with :-|

[AcidFast]

We call that a 'bed-n-breakfast' in Boston, araya, although I have no idea why...

If anyone's wondering, araya is talking about shooting at the 20, which is at 1200 on the board, and hitting with one dart, and missing with two, one to each side, where the 5 (left) and the 1 (right) are located. Its a very common throw, so we came up with a name for it...

[Quailman]

My son received a dart board for Christmas, so I'm just learning to play. It's electronic, though, so no subtraction necessary. Good thing, too, because he'd never want to play if it involved subtraction.

[araya]

The term bed n' breakfast comes from england. I don't know why it's called that either.

[Richk]

English dart player here,and i don't know what b+b means either

Here's some more i dont know if anyone's interested..

Double one-The Madhouse
Treble+Double+Single of any number-Shanghai

We also used to play with a rule where if a player was throwing for double 1 to finish and hit a single,he could still finish with his other darts by 'splitting 11'.That means he had to get a dart to land between the two wires that made up the number 11.

[godeloo]

26 is called " bed and breakfast " because the price of such in a cheap boarding house was 2shillings and sixpence, in old money and in common parlance that was rendered as " 2 and 6"

[godeloo]

I have taught some asian children and they count the joints of their fingers and the tips of their fingers getting 19 on each hand.

[AcidFast]

Thank you, godeloo. I always wondered about that.

AF

[godeloo]

Re Double one is called The Madhouse because it is the last double you can score on your way to victory e.g16 miss by scoring eight and you still have a double left, miss by scoring 4 and you still have a double left and so on. But double one if you miss and score the one you have no double left. Poor dart players often end up on double one and score 1 with their first dart and are left with 2 darts they cannot throw....do this a few times and result.......MADNESS.
Incidentally The throwing the dart to split the eleven was called double halves and was developed locally to get away from the madhouse.
As for Shanghai....there was a dart game where you progressed around the dartboard from 1 to 2 to 3 etc scoring as many as you can on that number but while on say 1 excluding any dart that did not land in the 1 segment. If you scored Double, single , treble you won the game outright. The name carried over from that game to real darts to describe the phenomena.

[mathgrant]

BUMP!!

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JDTAY and I are morons. Just ask Chess, he'll tell you.

[jesternl]

I'm inclined to say, is there any other way to count?
I always do it like that, for adding, substracting, multiplying, but usually with the nearest rounded off value, e.g 234 + 98 = 234 + 100 - 2
I used to try and beat people calculating stuff faster in my head than they could on their electronic calculators. Also, most number wizards work in the exact same way

234*234 = 200*200 + 30*234(3*10*234) + 4*234...works really good...

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GRTZ,
Jester
www.geocities.com/jesternl/antibill.html

The most exciting phrase to hear in science,
the one that heralds new discoveries, is not
"Eureka!" (I found it!) but "That's funny..."
-- Isaac Asimov

[Alfie]

My problem with binary counting starts when I get around 4. One second I am counting rests in band, the next my section thinks I a fliping them off!