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Ternary Computing
eviltwinimposter writes: "This month's American Scientist has an article about base-3 or ternary number systems, and their possible advantages for computing and other applications. Base-3 hardware could be smaller because of decreased number of components and use ternary logic to return less than, greater than, or equal, rather than just the binary true or false, although as the article says, '...you're not going to find a ternary minitower in stock at CompUSA.' Ternary also comes the closest of any integer base to e, the ideal base in terms of efficiency, and has some interesting properties such as unbounded square-free sequences. Also in other formats."
They've finally invented my favorite circuit... the Maybe gate?
Fascism starts when the efficiency of the government becomes more important than the rights of the people.
Setun operated on numbers composed of 18 ternary digits, or trits
Awww...they shied away from the obvious choice, tits.
2 4 8 16 32 64 128 256 512 1024 2048 4096...
10 seconds
3 9 27 81...ummmm...crap
10 seconds
This'll make all my computer-numbering knowledge obsolete
Last post!
What will we call the digits? Click here to find out:
http://www.schlockmercenary.com/d/20001226.html
I can't say that I don't give a fuck. I've just run out of fuck to give.
Nope: one, zero, and CowboyNeal.
And just think of the 2's! They'll get hooked around the slightest obstruction, and all the other numbers, causing constant clogging. And if the added number is -1, that's adding TWO SYMBOLS per bit instead of one!
__
Do ya feel happy-go-lucky, punk?
"Cheaper by the Threesome"
I can always go for a cheap three-some.
Pat
Humans are slow, innaccurate, and brilliant; computers are fast, acurrate, and dumb; together they are unbeatable
<highlander> THERE CAN ONLY BE ONE!</highlander>
(and zero)
If bits becomes tits, then I say bytes should become teats.
And, instead of a 'nibble' being four bits, we'd have a 'suckle' equaling three tits, like that babe in the movie Total Recall.
Instead of dealing in megabits or gigabytes, we'd have gigatits, which could be abbreviated as DD, saving vast amounts of bandwidth -- which might as well be called handwidth now -- or terateets, abbreviatable as DDD.
With all the sexual content in technical lingo (e.g., male and female plugs, master/slave, unix, etc.) this is only a natural development, and given that half of these machines are used for nothing but downloading pictures of naked breasts anyways...
Is this truly the only Earth I can live on?
As if in precognition, a language has already been developed for ternary computers:
TriINTERCAL! (the link is about INTERCAL, chapter 6 is about the TriINTERCAL extension)
I can't wait until college courses are taught in this truly wonderous and -- who would have thought -- futuristic language.
The enemies of Democracy are
> the choices will be 0, 1, and Maybe
You're all wrong.
There can BE only ONE!
:)
A friend and I were thinking about representations on a ternary system. We had to figure out what units of storage would be available.
;-)
Obviously, there's the basic unit of storage (1, 0, -1; on, off, undefined; true, false, maybe; whatever). We called this a trit for obvious reasons of parallel to the binary world.
Ok, good enough so far. Then, there's the basic unit that's used to store characters or very simple numbers. We decided that 9 trits would be good (this was to allow for UNICODE-like representations). This seemed to be a shoe-in for the title, tryte.
Then, you occasionally want to have something that is used in firmware to sub-divide trytes into various fields. In binary we call this a nibble, so in honor of Star Trek we called this one (3 trits) a tribble.
But, there it stopped, as we soon realized what we'd be measuring the system's word-size in.... Man, I thought SCSI was a painful phrase to use all the time
Excellent. This will translate Tri-Intercal, with native bitwise trinary operators, into much more efficient machine code.
I don't like this.
Any system that can't spell "42" is not worth it.
Don't make fun of my speling, english is my 2nd language...
Fry: It was just a dream, Bender. There's no such thing as 2.
-- Futurama