 Example: Tally sticks  One of the most elementary information measuring devices is unary counting using a tally stick. Tally sticks were already used around 20,000 years ago. When a hypothetical prehistoric hunter killed a deer he could have registered this fact by making a scratch “|” on a piece of wood. Every stroke on such a stick represents an object/item/event.  The process of unary counting is based on the elementary operation of catenation of symbols into sequences. This measuring method illustrates a primitive version of the concept of extensiveness of information: the length of the sequences is a measure for the amount of items counted. Note that such a sequential process of counting is non-commutative and non-associative. If “|” is our basic symbol and \(\oplus\) our concatenation operator then a sequence of signs has the form: 