A device or program that is wired into or resides in the memory of computer networking equipment. This device's sole purpose is to intercept every byte that passes through the device and tally ones versus zeroes. It would have the ability to detect if another similar device was on the same subnet and thusly prevent data count overlap.

Of course such a device would only work for transmitted data, so there is, at an added cost, a special processor interface device which will interpret every byte sent through a processor. Eventually, this process should be included as an automatic process done for every instruction cycle.

I've always wondered if there is an even split between ones and zeroes in the sum total of the digitized world, and this would be a good start to tallying this. There would be some overlap and missing data, and that's pretty much the only reason this is half baked and not perfect.
-- ericscottf, Dec 02 2009

0
-- FlyingToaster, Dec 02 2009


I wonder if there's a binary equivalent of Benford's law?
-- MaxwellBuchanan, Dec 02 2009


the answer is actually "ones"... I'll remove the bone if you figure out why (your homework, should you choose to accept it...)
-- FlyingToaster, Dec 02 2009


Does the initial data written to new storage hardware count ?
-- wjt, Dec 03 2009


[FT] On average there may be a bias but that bias is very slight. Remember this is random data not a binhex alphabet.
-- WcW, Dec 03 2009


messing with you... no clue, but given a filetype you generally should be able to say "ones", "zeros" or "random" with a bit of research...

8-bit ASCII .txt files would generally have more zeros because all the letters in the alphabet are <80 (so the high-order bit is always a zero). For object code you could rummage through the instruction set to see which ones are used the most. Etc.
-- FlyingToaster, Dec 03 2009


It seems like something you could bet on every day. In fact you could do a multi-bet wager. Count up the zeros and the ones and take bets on which will be higher. Or even bet on the last 3 digits of the actually count. e.g. if the total number of zeros comes out to be 741,283,206, then whoever played 206 is the winner.. then there are smaller cash prizes for the 3-digit number numbers that land in the hundred thousand and million places being that they would be much easier to predict.
-- Jscotty, Dec 03 2009


If we're to believe current statistics, media takes up an overwhelming percentage of computer time and internet traffic, so one might look at the ways various encoding schemes add up 1/0-wise.

If all other data were 1/0 neutral, then yes, 127 bit ascii would definitely nudge things towards the more zeroes side.

No, i don't count pre-initialized items (like non volatile chips and drives) as they don't count towards human-constructed data. That would be like adding up all the paintings in the world to see what color used the most, and counting all the blank canvas at the factory.

There seems to be a lot of hate out there for this idea, which was more just to get a feel for how to go about guessing a good answer..

I guess i'll tell the VC that we're not going to go forward with the Q1 shipments...
-- ericscottf, Dec 04 2009


I would bet on a high zero bias for a fairly simple reason. For a number, all the digits it fills up are going to be about evenly split between one and zero on average.
0
1
10
11
100
101

See, even numbers of each. However, all the values greater than those numbers are always going to be 0, up to the length of the word. Therefore if you pick a random number less than 50% of the word length, it will contain at least one zero, plus an approximately even distribution of 1s and 0s for the rest. A random number larger than 50% will contain just the even distribution.
-- MechE, Dec 04 2009


I like this idea because it is knowledge for knowledge. I'm talking the knowledge, the good good knowledge. I like the debate. Plus if there were asymmetry in 1 vs 0 would that suggest inefficiency, or maybe something of greater import, like excess of yin / deficiency of yang?
-- bungston, Dec 04 2009


Wouldn't the registers/bus/pipelines give a zero bias? All those unused bits are set to zero not one.

The thing with the canvas metaphor is that zero is not blank but initial painted colour (white generally). Then again, the manufacturers of storage could put pretty pictures in their bits and no-one would ever know.
-- wjt, Dec 06 2009


At fist I thought it would be pretty simple but as of yet I haven't found any easy way to do this short of simply reading the entire data sector, which would take as long as a de-frag.
-- WcW, Dec 06 2009


/Is yang like compression/

I am still thinking about this question.
-- bungston, Dec 09 2009



random, halfbakery