While balanced ternary is nice in all sorts of ways, there's an argument against it being the most efficient representation. You might consider 2 better in prac

While balanced ternary is nice in all sorts of ways, there's an argument against it being the most efficient representation. You might consider 2 better in practice in the sense that it makes it easier to pick the optimal amount of state space for a word when designing hardware. On any practical architecture a word has some fixed length, N, and the vastly most efficient case will be when your number fits within that space. That is, it is more efficient if the number can be represented in r^N bits of state. The amount of state an architecture gives you is dictated by many different considerations but the radix that offers you most control (that is, most different possible values for r^N) is 2. For instance, say you want a word length that can store numbers up to 500, you have the options of 2^N: 2, 4, 8, 16, 32, 64, 128, 256 3^N: 3, 9, 27, 81, 243 So 2 gives you 8 choices for N whereas 3 gives you 5. So 2 gives you more design space to choose the most efficient representation in practice.