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."

Comments

Re:Less than, greater than, or equal?

[po_boy]

I thought the three states were 'true', 'false' and 'I don't know'.

Nope: one, zero, and CowboyNeal.

Re:Trits?

[tswinzig]

Awww...they shied away from the obvious choice, tits.

No, I think that was a good decision. When I think of tits, I always imagine them in pairs.

Yes! Tits!

[corebreech]

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...