If I compare binary for 7
111
and binary for 8
1000
there is no correlation between these two patterns that suggests that the numbers are sequentially close to each other.
Is there a recognized, efficient encoding scheme using 1s and 0s for base ten numbers in which the more similar two patterns are, the closer the base ten numbers are?
Of course you could just have
1 -> 1
2 -> 11
3 -> 111
4 -> 1111
etc, but there must be more compact ways to do it!