How high can you count with your hands?

[Perfection]

Perfection and Piman are right on the money, finger binary, however I must say, I figured it out myself, rather than go to Wikipedia.

Yeah, I did too. Seems to be a common math nerd thing.

 

[Ayatollah So]

I then went further to say that, if a person, by some mutation, can get a third gesture of a finger, and designate it as 2, they would reach 59,048, and I kept going up until I reached 10 gestures, where I got 9,999,999,999.

Whaddaya mean, mutation? It's easy to distinguish four gestures per finger based on each of the joints either being folded or straight, and assuming that you find it too difficult to move them completely independently. If you can move each joint independently of the others, you've got 8 gestures per finger. And then, of course, there are various partway positions (but it becomes hard to keep those straight, if there are too many).

 

[Mise]

I can count to about 7 or 8.

 

[ParadigmShifter]

It's fairly easy to count in ternary on your fingers so I could probably count to 59048.

 

[warpus]

Counting is for fools

 

[North King]

Way to discriminate against people missing fingers.

 

[Agent327]

Oh, one can count invisible fingers. (Also, counting actually is an invisible act in itself if done by head.)

 

[azzaman333]

Negative 3.

 

[chrissifniotis]

It's fairly easy to count in ternary on your fingers so I could probably count to 59048.

Then I guess my fingers are a bit screwy. Ayatollah So is somewhat right, one can bend a finger in more than one way. Our fingers are made of three joints from the base, our thumbs - two, but they only bend at 90 degree angles on one side, so logically only four easy gestures can be made, curled - tips touching the palm, hooked, right angle and out, and our thumbs can't curl, but one can still add a fourth gesture to the thumb, by laterally pivoting the thumb to and from the palm. Having said that, it's possible then to count to 1,048,575 with two hands, but after that it'll be very hard to keep track and calculate.