4 ms·
Doesn't it depend on what problem you are solving and which building blocks you are starting with? Say you have a reversible electric motor. This will likely en
by cat_plus_plus 3y ago
Doesn't it depend on what problem you are solving and which building blocks you are starting with? Say you have a reversible electric motor. This will likely enable lighter/cheaper/more efficient/more reliable designs than one or two unidirectional motors and transmission to redirect the torque in desired direction. And if you can come up with tranary circuits for the controller, you again have fewer elements and less power losses compared to binary circuits.
Now, if you are going to build trenary circuits out of binary flip flops, you are wasting one state available out of 4 with two flip flops, so clearly suboptimal. You need unique interfaces and physics for each element to benefit from efficiency. Even unique programming languages - binary if/else logic is common, it could be that in real world if/else/unknown is common and can be handled more efficiently by trenary circuits, or new algorithms can be created to utilize a hardware-implemented trenary bit.
Of course, a likely answer is that, now that binary hardware and software is highly developed, it's not worth it to do complete redesigns for modest efficiency gains.
- Dylan16807 3y agoI'm pretty skeptical of this scenario. Motors are quite high power and require big dedicated amplifiers. I would expect a negligible difference from the amplifier input being two bits, or one trit, or a separate wire per state.
- theamk 3y agoPhysics is pretty harsh, and it really likes two-state circuits. One reason is well described in [0]: power consumption P=I*V.. With binary logic, one state means V=0 so power is zero; other state means I=0 so power is zero again; any sort of intermediate values means non-zero power consumption, which, when multiplied by a huge number of elements per IC means extreme heat and power wasting. And "existing software" never stopped innovations: we get all-new computation models all the time.. there are FPGAs and IRAMs and transputers and memristors and analog AI, and perhaps even GPU and DSP. None of them can use existing binary software and some of them have non-binary hardware. They don't all work well all the time, and yet people keep innovating and trying to find ways to make them work. And yet no one (outside of hobbyists) works on ternary computers. Physics is harsh. [0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38984009 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38984009