Why 64

[Lingrah]

Why is everything in numerals of 64.  I think  should know this.  All games i assist in are 64 tics per second.  Ram standard amounts are all multiplants or dividends of 64.  Many games (Minecraft is a good example) use 64 and it's dividends for just about everything.  So why is this.  What makes 64 so special?

[CoolaxGaming]

1 2 4 8 16 32 64 128 256 512 1024?

 

IDK, maybe a level in technology, maybe 32 would be too resource intensive and 128 would be too inaccurate?

[dadasmithywinkle]

Why is everything in numerals of 64.  I think  should know this.  All games i assist in are 64 tics per second.  Ram standard amounts are all multiplants or dividends of 64.  Many games (Minecraft is a good example) use 64 and it's dividends for just about everything.  So why is this.  What makes 64 so special?

Because it's the best and most compact way to store octets (size of data prior to bytes being determined) - In groups of 8. That's why everything is in groups of 8.

[,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,]

Taking a guess here but 0 = off 1 = on 0 = off 1 = on

0101

^ ^ ^ ^

1 2 3 4

 

1Gigabit = 8Gigabyte

 

All even numbers. ???

No idea what I'm trying to say here lol.

Binary!

[SOUTHwarrior]

Why is everything in numerals of 64.  I think  should know this.  All games i assist in are 64 tics per second.  Ram standard amounts are all multiplants or dividends of 64.  Many games (Minecraft is a good example) use 64 and it's dividends for just about everything.  So why is this.  What makes 64 so special?

It is base 2 binary. Everything computer related will be based off of it. like Coolax said 1 2 4 8 16 32 64 128 is how binary counts. and just puts 1's and 0's in which ever place the numbers are to add up to 255.

 

http://portforward.com/networking/bin.htm

 

Here is a good article to get a better understanding of it.

[Swndlr]

in minecraft its more of a balance sort of thing, on servers like factions and stuff like that it makes sense that you should only be able to hold x amount of things. like snowballs and enderpearls or potions or soups, think if you could hold 64 would make things unbalanced, so idk maybe mc was just a coincidence, but i think it makes more sense and more balanced to limit it @ 64.

[Assassin]

Also having everything in the powers of two makes it easier to do a binary search on.

[Lingrah]

Also having everything in the powers of two makes it easier to do a binary search on.

That is to true

[SSL]

Not sure the accepted answer really gets at the real reason. There is no particular practical reason today that there are 8 bits in a byte; this was established historically and since it both works well and would be inconvenient to change, it is how things are today.

 

Computers use binary because it's easier to represent numbers in a base-two system than, say, base-ten. Why? Because you only need two states to represent each digit: on/off (1/0). In a number system with a higher base you would need correspondingly more states to represent more digits. E.g. in base-ten you would need to be able to handle ten different states for a single digit alone. In hardware terms this is far less efficient. For example, imagine that you want to encode a digital stream by varying a voltage. With binary just two different voltages are required. With base-ten, you need ten different states. This is a problem because if the voltage changes even a little bit when it isn't supposed to, data gets corrupted. Two states is easier from an engineering standpoint.

 

So that establishes why binary is used in computers. As to why 64: simply because it is a power of 2. 64 also neatly fits 8 bytes, again because both are powers of 2. Modern computers also use 64-bit architecture because this allows software to address more memory than the old 32-bit architecture while maintaining backwards 32-bit compatibility.

[manon_gfx]

In general you see a lot of numbers that are a power of 2 in the computer world. This is mainly because of binary representation, it's like using 10, 100, 1000, etc in the decimal system. In binary we use 1, 2, 4, 8, 16, 32, 64, 128, 256, 512, 1024, 2048, 4096, 8192, 16384, 32768, 65536. (I know these off the top of my head).

There are also optimization reasons why you would use powers of two. If you wanna know more about this you can look up stuff about cache line alignment (warning, this is an advanced topic).

[SIGSEGV]

in minecraft its more of a balance sort of thing, on servers like factions and stuff like that it makes sense that you should only be able to hold x amount of things. like snowballs and enderpearls or potions or soups, think if you could hold 64 would make things unbalanced, so idk maybe mc was just a coincidence, but i think it makes more sense and more balanced to limit it @ 64.

It used to be 100 or 99 in infdev, it wasn't a coincidence, Notch had a reason for changing it, though I can't remember why

[Swndlr]

It used to be 100 or 99 in infdev, it wasn't a coincidence, Notch had a reason for changing it, though I can't remember why

something to do with the in game code maybe?

i always assumed it to just be a balancing of items (like blocks could be carried in higher numbers rather than having stacked swords)