16 (number) old days, weighing was done with a beam balance to make equal splits. It would be easier to split a heap of grains into sixteen equal parts through successive divisions than to split into ten parts. Chinese Taoists did finger computation on the trigrams and hexagrams by counting the finger tips and joints of the fingers with the tip of the thumb. Each hand can count up to 16 in such manner. The Chinese abacus uses two upper beads to represent the 5s and 5 lower beads to represent the 1s, the 7 beads can represent a hexadecimal digit from
Roman numerals 10=(,) and results from either crossing of the thumbs, or holding both hands up in a cross. Another possibility is that each represents a finger and represents the thumb of one hand. This way the numbers between 1–10 can be counted on one hand using the order: =P, =PR, =PRM, =IT, =T, =TP, =TPR, =TPRM, =IN, =N (P=pinky, R=ring, M=middle, I=index, T=thumb N=no fingers/other hand). This pattern can also be continued using the other hand with the fingers representing and the thumb . A third hypothesis about the origins states that the basic ciphers were , , and (or )