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by dTal 2223 days ago
>a base-10 multiplication table has 100 entries

Not quite! You can safely ignore identities (0, 1, and 10 itself) so you only have 8 numbers in your table. And multiplication is commutative so you only need 8+7+6... (= (8+1)(8/2) as per Gauss) = 36 entries.

Base 16 would have (14+1)(14/2) = 105 entries. So proportional to base-10, actually slightly harder than you said.

1 comments

The classic - detailed correction followed by "but yea you're totally right anyway" lmao
A fine demonstration how "basically correct in two sentences" is better than "technically correct in five sentences" in most situations.