A more efficient solution is to represent a sequence of these three symbols as a rational number in base 3 where each digit represents a symbol. For example, the sequence "ABBCAB" could become 0.0112013, in arithmetic coding as a value in the interval 0, 1). The next step is to encode this ternary number using a fixed-point binary number of sufficient precision to recover it, such as 0.00101100102 – this is only 10 bits; 2 bits are saved in comparison with naïve block encoding. This is feasible for long sequences because there are efficient, in-place algorithms for converting the base of arbitrarily precise numbers.