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Ternary is one of several crackpotry schools that were established in USSR. You'd have them write books on the subjects, rant in tech magazines… there even was
by varjag 2y ago
Ternary is one of several crackpotry schools that were established in USSR. You'd have them write books on the subjects, rant in tech magazines… there even was an SF short story about evil alien robots defeated by ternary.
Another big thing was TRIZ: a theory that you can codify invention by making a rulebook and arranging the rules in different permutations. There were plenty of smaller things too, especially in academia. It would typically start with one researcher sticking to some bizarre idea, then growing his own gang of grad students and adjuncts who all feed on that. Except the theory would be borderline batshit and all the publications are in-group, referring each other, and naturally a semester or two worth of this sectarian stuff is getting dropped into the undergrad curriculum.
- homarp 2y agoTRIZ previously on HN https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18045322 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18045322 (and a few others) and https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Systematic_inventive_thinking https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Systematic_inventive_thinkin... then https://arxiv.org/abs/2403.13002 https://arxiv.org/abs/2403.13002 (AutoTRIZ: Artificial Ideation with TRIZ and Large Language Models)
- varjag 2y agoThis article contains content that is written like an advertisement. (June 2020)
- marcosdumay 2y agoDuring most of the time USSR existed, computer electronics were away from the optimum enough that ternary logic was competitive with binary. It was just at the late 80s that this changed.
- varjag 2y agoI doubt it was competitive at any point. Setun had not demonstrated any practical edge in its generation and noone tried to reproduce it afterwards.
- shrubble 2y agoTRIZ is not bizarre or strange. It is a series of concepts and ideas which are meant to help you get unstuck when working through a difficult engineering problem.
- varjag 2y agoI know what it meant for but the evidence for its efficacy is thin.
- fooker 2y ago> a theory that you can codify invention by making a rulebook and arranging the rules in different permutations. You can. It's just slow that's all. Superoptimizers 'invent' new compiler optimizations by exactly this technique.
- mordae 2y agoSounds like a good description of the current state of affairs in the academia, though.
- vintermann 2y agoFringe theories in mathematics sometimes work out. Neural nets is arguably one of them: For the longest time, neural nets were simply worse than SVMs on most metrics you could think of.