unitbut

Unitbut is a fictional unit of measurement used in speculative writing, gaming, and discussion of futuristic computing to quantify the amount of information content or the amount of computational effort required for a task. There is no universal standard for unitbut, and its meaning tends to vary by author, context, or game rules.

In information-content terms, a unitbut can be used as a coarse proxy for how much data or uncertainty is resolved by a task. In some sources, one unitbut roughly corresponds to a small, defined chunk of information beyond a base level, while in others it is treated as a purely relative measure to compare tasks without committing to real-world units like bits. In this sense, unitbut serves as a narrative tool rather than a precise metric.

In the computational-effort sense, a unitbut represents the processing work required on a given baseline system. Different communities may fix a baseline hardware model and then define one unitbut as the cost of a standard operation under that model. Scales are typically linear or near-linear, with tasks described as needing tens, hundreds, or thousands of ub depending on complexity.

In some contexts, unitbut is also used to express human cognitive load when interacting with interfaces or puzzles, again as a relative measure rather than a strict scientific unit. The term appears in fan wikis, tabletop rules, and world-building discussions to convey technology levels and interface difficulty.

See also: bits, information theory, computational complexity, cognitive load.