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> No, of course thats only true for digital computers. Not even that. Computers with ternary instead of binary logic are possible: http://en.wikipedia.org/wik
by ralfd 14y ago
> No, of course thats only true for digital computers.
Not even that. Computers with ternary instead of binary logic are possible:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ternary_computer http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ternary_computer
Quote:
"The only modern, electronic ternary computer Setun was built in the late 1950s in the Soviet Union at the Moscow State University by Nikolay Brusentsov […]
IBM also reports infrequently on ternary computing topics (in its papers), but it is not actively engaged in it."
- derekp7 14y agoWhich brings up a question I've always had. If a Quantum computer uses bits that are on, off, and both, can't this be simulated with a Ternary computer?
- cgranade 14y agoYou need more classical resources to model a qubit in generality. This is because a qubit can be in the "0" state, the "1" state, or in any superposition between them. For a single qubit, you can describe an arbitrary superposition by two angles [1], each of which is a continuous real number. While you can't extract both of these parameters from a single measurement, a classical computer has to know both angles to simulate that qubit. Thus, it's more like that you need two floats to simulate a single qubit. When you have more than one qubit, the requirements get much worse, as you can have superpositions over all of the possible classical states. When you work through the math, you find that you need a vector of 2^n - 1 complex floats to model a register of n qubits in full generality. Going from a classical bit to a classical trit does nothing to help with that exponential scaling. [1]: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bloch_sphere http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bloch_sphere
- ars 14y agoIt's not just "both" it's 1 and 0 in any proportion. 97% 1 and 3% 0, 23% 1 and 77% 0, etc.