Responding to your edit: I don't think you should take the phone menu example too seriously, I think that was just meant as a fun diversion. The real question i

Responding to your edit: I don't think you should take the phone menu example too seriously, I think that was just meant as a fun diversion. The real question is whether a ternary-logic microprocessor would require a smaller area than a binary one, under the plausible assumption that this is proportional to depth * width. I think that would almost certainly not be the case -- binary is just so much more natural than ternary that you're just going to end up simulating ternary with binary anyway. In fact that is exactly what seems to have happened in the attempt that he describes to build a ternary computer.