In digital circuits there’s “high”, “low”, and “high impedance”.

Analog is next. Software first, then build the machines. No more models, reductions, loss. Direct perception through measurement and differences.

Well, maybe.

> Trinary didn’t make any headway in the 20th century; binary’s direct mapping to the “on”/”off” states of electric current was just too effective, or seductive; but remember that electric current isn’t actually “on” or “off”. It has taken a ton of engineering to “simulate” those abstract states in real, physical circuits, especially as they have gotten smaller and smaller.

But, I think things are actually trending the other way, right? You just slam the voltage to “on” or “off” nowadays—as things get smaller, voltages get lower, and clock times get faster, it gets harder to resolve the tiny voltage differences.

Maybe you can slam to -1. OTOH, just using 2 bits instead of one... trit(?) seems easier.

Same reason the “close window” button is in the corner. Hitting a particular spot requires precision in 1 or 2 dimensions. Smacking into the boundary is easy.

I've always thought we could put a bit of general purpose TCAM into general purpose computers instead of just routers and switches, and see what people can do with it.

I know (T)CAM's are used in CPU's, but I am nore thinking of the kind of research being done with TCAM's in SSD like products, so maybe we will get there some day.

There's a ton of places in modern silicon where a voltage represents far more than just on or off. From the 16 levels of QLC to the various PAM technologies used by modern interconnects

Mapping the three trinary values to yes no and maybe is semantic rubbish

This is off topic but how do you build and post to that blog? Homegrown or framework?

Transistors are generally at their lowest static power dissipation if the are either fully on or off. The analog middle is great if you're trying to process continuous values, but then you're going to be forced to use a bias current to hold on in the middle, which is ok if that's the nature of the circuit.

A chip with billions of transistors can't reasonably work if most of them are in the analog mode, it'll just melt to slag, unless you have an amazing cooling system.

Also consider that there is only one threshold between values on a binary system. With a trinary system you would likely have to double the power supply voltage, and thus quadruple the power required just to maintain noise margins.

I seem to remember reading about "fuzzy logic" (a now-quaint term), where a trinary state was useful.

> Trinary is philosophically appealing because its ground-floor vocabulary isn’t “yes” and “no”, but rather: “yes”, “no”, and “maybe”. It’s probably a bit much to imagine that this architectural difference could cascade up through the layers of abstraction and tend to produce software with subtler, richer values … yet I do imagine it.

You can just have a struct { case yes; case no; case maybe; } data structure and pepper it throughout your code wherever you think it’d lead to subtler, richer software… sure, it’s not “at the hardware level” (whatever that means given today’s hardware abstractions) but that should let you demonstrate whatever proof of utility you want to demonstrate.

Trinary is an efficient way of storing lots of -1/0/1 machine learning model weights. But as soon as you load it into memory, you need RAM that can store the same thing (or you're effectively losing the benefits: storage is cheap). So now you need trinary RAM, which as it turns out, isn't great for doing normal general purpose computation with. Integers and floats and boolean values don't get stored efficiently in trinary unless you toss out power of two sized values. CPU circuitry becomes more complicated to add/subtract/multiply those values. Bitwise operators in trinary become essentially impossible for the average IQ engineer to reason about. We need all new IAs, assembly languages, compilers, languages that can run efficiently without the operations that trinary machines can't perform well, etc.

So do we have special memory and CPU instructions for trinary data that lives in a special trinary address space, separate from traditional data that lives in binary address space? No, the juice isn't worth the squeeze. There's no compelling evidence this would make anything better overall: faster, smaller, more energy efficient. Every improvement that trinary potentially offers results in having to throw babies out with the bathwater. It's fun to think about I guess, but I'd bet real money that in 50 years we're still having the same conversation about trinary.

ChatGPT 5-Pro, What would it be like if we used trinary instead of binary computers? https://chatgpt.com/s/t_68f53bb9b15c8191b8d732f722243719

Ternary is indeed an enticing, yet ultimately flawed dream.

Quaternary allows for:

  True, “Yes”

  False, “No”

  Undetermined, “Maybe”, True or False

  Contradiction, “Invalid”, True and False

Many people don’t know this, but all modern computers are quaternary, with 4 quaternit bytes. We don’t just let anyone in on that. Too much power, too much footgun jeopardy, for the unwashed masses and Python “programmers”.