[PeterisP]

Okay, but it does seem that this hack is in the entirely opposite direction; a pure transformer is more towards "learning to learn" than any special preprocessing to explicitly encode a different representation of numbers.

We probably do have to move beyond transformers, but not in the direction of such hacks, but rather towards even more general representations that could encode the whole class of all such alternate representations and then learn from data which of them work best.

[uoaei]

You seem to be making my point just fine. What was your confusion, then?