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Awesome, I hope it works. How do you make ternary gates out of a DG403? (It’s an analog switch that would pass ternary, but the switch control inputs are binary.) https://www.vishay.com/docs/70049/dg401.pdf
https://hsto.org/webt/4a/mb/ad/4ambad_bocdk6_0khdqve6grzjs.p...
two ternary multiplexers out of two dg403 chips.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
It is mathematically the most "economical" integer base in terms of space, when considering complexity of digit representation along with word length [1]. [1] Hayes, B. (2001). Third base. American Scientist 89: 490-494 ( http://lrss.fri.uni-lj.si/sl/teaching/ont/lectures/third_bas... )
Of course the "optimal one" would be base "e" but nobody is going to be able to do anything remotely reasonable with it... (pg. 491 of that manuscript).
By the time someone built a base 20 computer it would probably be an anachronism anyway.
Would logic with more than 2 states let us continue to increase computational density? I know we are doing this for SSDs but they're simple and (mostly) homogeneous.
Think about it this way: as the number of states approaches infinity, you're back to analog computing.
It's a design parameter, not something that lets us break past limits on computational density, which right now is heat removal and quantum tunneling in transistors.
Would logic with more than 2 states let us continue to increase computational density? I know we are doing this for SSDs but they're simple and (mostly) homogeneous.
Adding more states to an electronic system is trading robustness and noise insensitivity for better performance. Think about it this way: as the number of states approaches infinity, you're back to analog computing. It's a design parameter, not something that lets us break past limits on computational density, which right now is heat removal and quantum tunneling in transistors.
[1] If memory servers, adders and cache access and a bunch of other logic typically require O(nlog₂n) gates in binary, but O(nlog₃n) in ternary, Which means as the native integer size increases, bases greater than 2 scale better.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Of course the "optimal one" would be base "e" but nobody is going to be able to do anything remotely reasonable with it... (pg. 491 of that manuscript).
base 7 is very nearly e^2, and 20 is almost exactly e^3. Base 20 would fix many problems with floating point math, wouldn't it? By the time someone built a base 20 computer it would probably be an anachronism anyway.
It's true that you can conveniently represent the numbers by using integer powers of the base (like representing binary with hexadecimal), but the whole reason e is a "good" base in the first place is because you're (partially) minimizing the number of distinct symbols needed to represent a number, and you lose that once you go to a higher base.
Plus, using a slightly-off integer like 7 breaks the integer-power-mapping anyway.
[1] x ^ (N/x) for any N.
Beautiful! I once tried using ternary to explain to a semi-retired mainframe programmer how we wanted to modify a binary field to have more than two choices. He was so mad and insisted you can't just MAKE UP MATH when explaining your project goals. This project would have made his head explode.
Unless you've been burned by that before and remember to check those assumptions.
Beautiful! I once tried using ternary to explain to a semi-retired mainframe programmer how we wanted to modify a binary field to have more than two choices. He was so mad and insisted you can't just MAKE UP MATH when explaining your project goals. This project would have made his head explode.
I do think a set/enum is a better structure than a ternary field for T/F/null. Even if you defined the elements of the set to be { TRUE, FALSE, NULL }. Because, I believe, most of us see a field containing a T/F and assume it's a binary, not ternary field. Even if someone notices that the field is null-able, they might assume it's a mistake. Unless you've been burned by that before and remember to check those assumpt…
I found that ‘4’ a weird choice for a ternary computer, until I read that R1 is special.
Register-to-register moves always involve R1. There are 12 such moves into R1 and 12 out of R1. That leaves 3 trit patterns in a 3-trit value for “increment R1”, “decrement R1” and “NOP”.
Also, this architecture doesn’t allow reading data from, or writing data to memory. The memory only is there for storing. programs. So, it’s almost as if this has one register, 12 words of data memory and 729 words of program memory.
Weird, but economical on the hardware, I guess, so it keeps the cost and amount of work down. Also, there’s room for extension commands, so the above may change.
