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Domain: computer-museum.ru
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Comments · 9
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Re:I can't be the only one wondering
A 1958 Soviet Union computer used ternary logic.
And according to this and this Donald Knuth thinks that sometime "flip-flop" will be replaced by "flip-flap-flop". Also this.
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Re:Eh.
I think it's safe to say they didn't have any exotic computer technology. Of course, hindsight is 20-20. ^.^
No? It's well known that the Soviets developed computers based on ternary logic (rather than binary) -- that seems pretty exotic to me. I thought it was equally well understood that it was more expedient to switch to clones of Western technology, so that's what happened.
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Ternary/Quaternary
For anyone confused about what ternary and quaternary states are, here's a paper on a ternary machine... There actually was a couple of ternary computers built but they never left the university stage...
http://www.computer-museum.ru/english/setun.htm
With this storage it would become more practical to build ternary machines which greatly simplify computing.
The ramifications for artificial intelligence are astounding... Think of the number of transistors required to be reduced by a factor of 7, and look at what we could do with current chip manufacturing methods, and you can see the advantages of ternary design over binary. The power requirements are also sharply reduced.
It's pretty crazy... Check out the references at the bottom of the link. One is in English, the other is in Russian.
-Viz
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Re:I'm just curiousLet's say you had a computer that stored decimal digits. The number of digits necessary to hold the value 9 is 1, compared to 4 bits (1001); the number of digits needed to store the value 256 is 3, compared to 9 bits (100000000)... so on and so forth. If a digit (or a trit, or a hexit, or whatever) could be implemented in hardware in the same way as bits, we would drastically improve storage capacity.
There's also absolutely no reason that a digit can't be treated as boolean... if it's zero, it's false, if it's anything else, it's true. This is the way booleans are abstracted with integers in C. Greater-than-binary digits have the added advantage of being able to represent everybody's favorite logical state, "unknown".
AFAIK, the reason contemporary computers are binary is because that's the easiest way to do it from an electronics standpoint, but I'm not into EE, so I could be wrong on that. There have been ternary computers; see the Setun for an old example from Russia...
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Re:I hope they can do it without the spin-stabiliz
The other problem is that the main folks who have an off-the-shelf flight computer that would be suitable is the Air Force. Who obviously isn't going to sell one to "just anyone", which means that an X-prize contender can't have it.
Or, they could have bought one from the "independant suppliers" such as this one:
http://www.argon.ru/production/a-60.htm.
To learn more about russian on-board computers,
visit this site: http://www.computer-museum.ru/english/0.htm. -
If you want to see really old and unusual stuff...
go to Russian Computer Museum
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Re:Ternary computersA search on Google gives a number of interesting links, including:
- photo at the European Museum on CS and Technology
- article (including bibliography) at the Virtual Computer Museum
- discussion of ternary computing at American Scientist
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SETUN - Russian ternary computer
I have seen in one book that there was created a ternary computer long time ago. I have tried to find anything with google and found this page.
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Re:Cool!