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1 year agoI was having a weird one today so I read through the book of Amos. It’s shockingly similar to the current situation.
Amos prophesied that Gaza would be destroyed, even genocided, as a reaction to crimes that included kidnapping entire communities. But that’s just an intro to a prophecy that Israel would be violently and mercilessly destroyed in response to a long list of their own crimes.
I’m not saying that Amos predicted the current situation, just that it’s sad how little we’ve improved in 2500 years.
It really mostly doesn’t, and Quanta Magazine is (as is typical for them) full of sh*t.
Ternary is most efficient if the space (power, etc) needed to implement an operation on a base-b digit is proportional to b. (Then the cost is b * log(n) / log(b), and b/log b is minimized at e, but is lower with b=3 than with b=2.) However, in practice most operations take space that increases more than proportionally to b. For example, saturated transistors are either on or off, which is enough to implement binary logic, but ternary logic needs typically several more transistors. Transistors, and especially CMOS style implementations, are generally well-suited to binary. If future computers use a different implementation style (neurons! who knows) then something other than binary logic might be best.
Storing and transmitting data is different: this is often most efficient in bases other than 2. For example, if a flash cell of a certain size can reliably store 4 different amounts of charge, and the difference between these can reliably be read out, then flash manufacturers will store two bits per cell. This is already done and has been done for years. It’s most often done in bases that are powers of 2, but not always.
Ternary calculations are occasionally used in cryptography, but as far as I can tell, at least the first ternary crypto paper the article cites is garbage.
There are also other architectures like clockless logic, which uses a third value for “not done calculating yet”, but that’s different from ordinary ternary logic (and is generally implemented using binary anyway). It also showed a lot of promise for saving power, and also some in reducing interference, but in most settings the increased complexity and circuit size required have been too much to deliver that savings.