Background:
- The System That Could Replace Binary And Change Computers FOREVER - Codeolences
- Ternary Computing the Way to Go Beyond Moore’s Law? | Dr Steven Bos - Codeolences
This video confuses at least three different concepts - quantum uncertainty, ternary computers, and “unknown” values.
Ternary computers are just not as good as binary computers. The way silicon works, it’s always going to be much much slower.
“Unknown” values can be useful - they are common in SystemVerilog for example. But you rarely just have true, false and unknown, so it makes zero sense to bake that into the hardware. Verilog has 4 values - true, false, unknown and disconnected. VHDL has something like 9!
And even then the “unknown” isn’t as great as you might think. It’s basically poor-man’s symbolic execution and is unable to cope with things like
let foo = some_unknown_value ? true : true. Yes that does happen and you won’t like the “solution”.High level programming concepts like
optionwill always map more cleanly onto binary numbers.Overall, very confused video that is trying to make it sound like there’s some secret forgotten architecture or alternative history when there definitely isn’t.
I top linked the most recently published video mostly for the introductory breakdown in ternary logic equivalence, but the interview with the ternary researcher, Dr Bos, also linked in the description above includes a number of corrections and accurate description of the subject.
Yeah, definitely not a lost art or anything, as physical ternary signals already have applications in communication like high data rate interfaces. Still, would be interesting to see ternary expand into logic domains with emerging developments in TCMOS research.
There are a lot of videos on this renaissance. Maybe an advance in electronics will make it worthwhile in hardware.
One area ternary is investigated is LLMs/classification. Bitnet was the pioneer model…
