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the I ching: yin(0) and yang(1); 1000BC

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/I_Ching

If I remember a lecture from decades ago rightly, Liebnitz encountered and became interested in the I Ching, beginning his interested in binary numbers.

Yes, but I think we're talking specifically about positional numbers using binary digits.

The I ching works like a binary look up table

You divine a series of yins and yangs, usually 3 or 6.. trigrams and hexgrams (o).. then look up that sequence in the text to discover it's meaning

010010 references one, whereas 000100 references another

I guess you could argue it's more Shannon than leibniz

(o) https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/I_Ching#Hexagrams

Yeah, but do you ever perform an operation on two hexagrams (addition, multiplication)?

If not, each hexagram is just a bitstring, not a number in binary notation. If not used as numbers they don't count as numbers.

Words written with the standard English alphabet are not base-26 numbers until someone decides to interpret them as such. Dictionaries are lookup tables but the ordering is lexical not numerical. Maybe we are in agreement.

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