3 ms·

That example looks exactly like it would in binary computing?

Someone 3y ago
Of course it does. The representation of numbers is irrelevant, as long as its interface doesn’t change. The only place you’d see changes are in bitwise/tritwise operations and in limits of fixed-size integers (abs(i) would likely be well defined for all ints, for example, and we would have INT_MAX = -INT_MIN, with values like 3^81 or 3^27). Ternary floats probably would do away with the distinction between -0 and +0, too.
- jerf 3y ago
  Which is also why I don't see any reason why we'd need a new "language" to use ternary computing. I'm not even sure what a library would do; if you have arbitrary precision ints and/or floats, that's basically all you need for an adapter. For instance, a ternary computer might be able to store a tri-state value more efficiently, but you'd still have the exact same code to resolve it ("case 0: {} case 1: {} case 2: {}"), and it's not like it suddenly mandates that all your binary conditions grow a third clause lest the hardware combust. A trit having more room than a binary value requires isn't news when a lot of our binary values are already consuming a full byte, if not at times a full machine word, as it is. I've seen one other person in the past many years who A: believed ternary computing was very important and B: was absolutely impossible to convince that there is literally nothing a ternary computer can do that a binary computer can not. But there is literally nothing a ternary computer can do that a binary computer can not. The reasons why it may be interesting relate to being one possible avenue for squeezing one last drop of hardware performance out of a system that has otherwise reached its limits, but it is minimally interesting from a software perspective. I think no one is particularly interested in it at this time because there's no step after that; there's no "super ternary" you can go to after that, and for various mathematical reasons stepping up to 4 is much, much less helpful if not actively a step backwards (it turns out that in many ways, 3 is the optimum; actually it's e, but 3 is the closest you can get to that). An optical computer might go faster the next generation, a quantum computer can add more qubits, transistors can be cooled and stacked and built out of graphene and all sorts of other things, but a ternary-ness is a dead end. It's the last thing you do when all else fails.

Of course it does. The representation of numbers is irrelevant, as long as its interface doesn’t change. The only place you’d see changes are in bitwise/tritwise operations and in limits of fixed-size integers (abs(i) would likely be well defined for all ints, for example, and we would have INT_MAX = -INT_MIN, with values like 3^81 or 3^27). Ternary floats probably would do away with the distinction between -0 and +0, too.

jerf 3y ago
Which is also why I don't see any reason why we'd need a new "language" to use ternary computing. I'm not even sure what a library would do; if you have arbitrary precision ints and/or floats, that's basically all you need for an adapter. For instance, a ternary computer might be able to store a tri-state value more efficiently, but you'd still have the exact same code to resolve it ("case 0: {} case 1: {} case 2: {}"), and it's not like it suddenly mandates that all your binary conditions grow a third clause lest the hardware combust. A trit having more room than a binary value requires isn't news when a lot of our binary values are already consuming a full byte, if not at times a full machine word, as it is. I've seen one other person in the past many years who A: believed ternary computing was very important and B: was absolutely impossible to convince that there is literally nothing a ternary computer can do that a binary computer can not. But there is literally nothing a ternary computer can do that a binary computer can not. The reasons why it may be interesting relate to being one possible avenue for squeezing one last drop of hardware performance out of a system that has otherwise reached its limits, but it is minimally interesting from a software perspective. I think no one is particularly interested in it at this time because there's no step after that; there's no "super ternary" you can go to after that, and for various mathematical reasons stepping up to 4 is much, much less helpful if not actively a step backwards (it turns out that in many ways, 3 is the optimum; actually it's e, but 3 is the closest you can get to that). An optical computer might go faster the next generation, a quantum computer can add more qubits, transistors can be cooled and stacked and built out of graphene and all sorts of other things, but a ternary-ness is a dead end. It's the last thing you do when all else fails.