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The Ternary Computing Manifesto (uiowa.edu)
9 points by fanf2 on July 24, 2024 | hide | past | favorite | 4 comments


Colin Wright joke from ten years ago[1]:

There are 10 kinds of people in the world, those that understand binary, those that don't, and those that didn't expect this joke to be in ternary.

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7036546


Fun stuff!

I'm struggling to see how it's a manifesto instead of a design spec. I was hoping to learn the perceived advantages of this architecture. (With a lot of brain power I could probably figure that out, but I haven't had my coffee yet.)

Regardless, it's an impressive amount of work to spec out a ternary computer, although I think the Russians did it a long time ago.

EDIT: I did a lot of work with an expert system that had ternary logic (1=true, -1=false, 0=uncertain) over floating point values so I like the concept. I'm just not sure it extends to general computing.


> Posted to the web April 1, 2012.

and

> While this work began as something of a joke, there are some very serious reasons that ternary logic may have value.

Not sure I'm convinced...


Dreaming of a mad billionaire bootstrapping a balanced ternary ecosystem from the ground up.




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