Ternary Computing Revisited

Black Acid writes: "American Scientist's Third Base was a nice introduction to the advantages base 3 but didn't really explain ternary computing. Since 1995, Steve Grubb has maintained trinary.cc which covers many aspects of computing with base 3. Not only are the basic unary and binary gates enumerated, which I independently verified as being basic building blocks, but real-world circuits are described also. Half and full adders, multiplexers and demultiplexers, counters, shift registers, and even the legendary flip-flap-flop are all covered with ternary algebra equations and schematics. Steve Grubb touches on problems of of interfacing to binary computers elegantly, although no schematics are given. Perhaps most impressive are the Transistor Models - schematics of the basic gates which can be built from cheap parts available at your local electronic component store."

Comments

Why Tri why not just go Analog ?

[CDWert]

This is all nice, but if we have to go to all the effort to reinvent the wheel , why not go all the way, I mean if we have to come up with all new components and software why no go the Analog route ?
Digital computing gained popularity for many reasons, cost effective to build, easy to program, with the state of current electronics this is no longer neccesarly the case but we there ,
Analog copmuting has many advantages over digital computing, especially in the AI arena, Since there can never be a digital concept of infinity
Rockets in the beggining were put into orbit using ANALOG computers, there is a reason, accuracy to the nth factor.

I played around with analog computing in the 70-early 80's cool stuff if more would have been available, fact wsas everyone was happy with their 8 bit pc.

Trinary computing sounds a little like taking something that was settled on in the first place and resettling again
I mean come on isnt the goal of computing to have a supercomputer take control of our national defense grid when it becomes sentient ?

Adopting crypto to trenary computing

[Kiwi]

One of the engineering problems w.r.t. trenary computing is how to have a crypto algoritm for trenary computing, since all of the modern crypto schemes assume binary computing.

One of the nice things about the Rijndael crypto algorithm is that, becuase of its "wide trail strategy" design, it is easy to adopt to different environments, including trenary computing.

I am sure that a variant of Rijndael which does everyting in "trits" instead of "bits" would have the same security features as the current Rijndael algorithm. The only thing that would have to be re-invented is the sbox. The rest (changing the galois field to a 3-base instead of a 2-base galois field, and chainging the MDS matrix used) could be simply adopted.

- Sam