[coinomega]

> "Bitwise" is really shorthand for "this is an operation that acts on the representation of a number in base-2, rather than on the number itself"

I would argue that while bitwise operations are indeed more easily represented/computed in base 2 than in base 10, they do act on the 'number itself', whichever base you then represent this number in. ... at least in the approach I took, where I treat bit strings as representations of 'numbers', specifically positive integers. If you think of such operations as manipulating 'strings' of characters - whatever character set those are taken from - rather than numbers then indeed we indeed arrive to different conclusions, and your digit-wise MIN generalization makes sense.

I think both approaches are meaningful, although conceptually different, and I have tried, however clumsily, to explain the 2 approaches in a previous post (https://medium.com/biffures/bits-101-120f75aeb75a#.fc93no6od) before settling for the 'number' approach for this post.

I am actually not a proponent of using base 10 as the standard view for bitwise operations, I merely use that base to show that the function looks complicated in base 10 and brings little further intuition on what pattern AND follows. Note that the rest of the article and all visualizations are NOT base-dependent and do not use the base-10 formula. (I did write my numbers in base-10 in the sketches simply out of convenience, but feel free to translate to any base).

Is this revolutionary? Certainly not. But I do think the graphs look cool, and I was happy to share them. Hope this clarifies some of the thinking behind the post; and thanks for the constructive thoughts! - seems like I can do plenty of read-up .-)

C