>Almost all of these analyses of ternary hinge on the idea of efficiency of representation, being the (number of possible symbols) * (number of digits to repres

>Almost all of these analyses of ternary hinge on the idea of efficiency of representation, being the (number of possible symbols) * (number of digits to represent). >But it seems way more useful to use the log of the number of possible symbols This always bothered me as well. Hardware cost does not scale linearly with the number of possible states of each digit. My personal theory is that the real hardware cost is less related to the number of possible states/symbols, and more related to the amount of effort required to reliably distinguish one state from another. Taking a cue from information theory, that implies the complexity per digit should track the Eb/No (SNR per information bit) of the symbol set.