Editing 2637: Roman Numerals

{{incomplete|100reate500 by a LXXXT <!-- The idea behind replacing BOT with LXXXT is that BO looks like 80. --> - Please change this comment when editing this page. Do NOT delete this tag too soon.}}

Roman numerals are an archaic system of representing numbers that uses the letters I, V, X, L, C, D, and M to represent numbers, which each letter representing a consistent value. Specifically, I represents 1, V represents 5, X represents 10, L represents 50, C represents 100, D represents 500, and M represents 1000. The rules for combining Roman numerals next to each other are that a Roman numeral is added to a Roman numeral of equal or lesser value just to its right (e.g., II=1+1=2 because 1≥1, and VI=5+1=6 because 5≥1), and a Roman number is subtracted from a Roman numeral of greater value just to its right (e.g., IV=5-1=4 because 1<5, and IX=10-1=9 because 1<10). (Also, each place must be written separately, e.g., one cannot represent 49 via IL but instead must represent the tens place and ones place separately via XL IX—although the space would not be included in practice).

 

Thus in Roman numerals a digit always has the same absolute value but may be positive or negative depending on the digit after it, whereas for Hindu-Arabic numerals, a digit's value changes by a power of 10 depending on its absolute position and is never subtracted.  

Translated properly into more familiar digits, these equations are:

But Randall/Cueball replaced each letter individually with its value in Hindu-Arabic numerals — ignoring the abovementioned rules for interpreting combined Roman numbers, instead using simple concatenation. Specifically, "I" is replaced with "1", "V" is replaced with "5", and "X" is replaced with "10". For example, for IX at the end of the last equation, "I" is replaced with "1", and "X" is replaced with "10", so "IX" becomes "110". Thus, the equations become

The joke is that because Hindu numerals do not use the same rules of addition and subtraction as Roman numerals, simple concatenation makes the equations incorrect. For example, 11 is read as 10+1, not 1+1 as it should under the correct rules for interpreting Roman numerals. Randall derives additional humor from the premise that Cueball seems to know Roman numerals better than Hindu numerals (as demonstrated by the fact that he does not recognize that his equations are false when interpreted using the standard rules for Hindu numerals) so that he would do math in Roman numerals and have to remember to convert his equations to Hindu numerals at the end. Schoolchildren in the West have been taught to do math with Hindu numerals, not Roman numerals, for centuries.

In the title text, Randall applies the same idea of replacing Roman numerals with their values in Hindu numerals to strings of English words. The original string (with letters that would be interpreted as Roman numerals capitalized) is, "CheCk out thIs InnoVatIVe strIng enCoDIng I'Ve been DeVeLopIng! It's VIrtuaLLy perfeCt!" For the first word, "Check," C is replaced with the value of that Roman numeral in Hindu numerals, i.e., "100", in both instances of the word, which results in "100he100k". Unlike in the comic, Randall combines Roman numbers using the proper rules of addition and subtraction. For example, he replaces "IV" with "4", not "15", e.g., "innovative" becomes "1nno5at4e", not "1nno5at15e". (However, "I've" becomes "15e", not "4e", presumably because the apostrophe was removed after, not before, replacing the Roman numerals with Hindu numerals. However, there is not an obvious reason why Randall removed the apostrophe.) However, there are problems with this. One example is that the double L in "virtually" is replaced with 100. This correctly remembers Roman numerals' rule of adding the value of a letter to the value of an equal-valued letter just to its right, but in Roman numerals, a single number should never have multiple Vs, multiple Ls, or multiple Ds, e.g., 100 should be represented by C, not LL. This would mean that a simplistic decoding script would erroneously decode "6rtua100y" to "virtuacy", not "virtually". Thus, this string encoding system is not actually perfect. (Until the modern codification in general use today, Roman numerals weren't standardised that much, so "LL" could have been a tolerated alternative to "C". For more on that, see {{w|Roman_numerals#Classical_Roman_numerals}}. However, having the decoding script use that would not solve the problem but instead would make the decoding script replace Cs with LLs instead, e.g., "delloding sllript".)

:[Cueball writing on a wall or a whiteboard.]