Project 8.1

Historical Question In the Boston Museum of Fine arts is a display of carefully made stone cubes found in the ruins of Mohenjo-Daro of the Indus. The stones are a set of weights that exhibit the binary pattern, 1, 2, 4, 8, 16, ... . The fundamental unit displayed is just a bit lighter than the ounce in the U.S. measurement system. The old European standard of 16 oz for 1 pound may be a relic of the same idea. Write a paper showing how a set of such stones can successfully be used to measure any reasonable given weight of more than one unit.

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