alt Hacker NewsI was actually mucking with ChatGPT about possible "post-binary" architectures.
I ended up feeling that ternary is just icky, because the "middle value" doesn't have an "opposite"
Maybe we should do what quaternions did to complex numbers and just jump from 2 to 4: Quaternary CPUs
I couldn't understand half of the words it spat out but it turns out that using pairs of "quits" as the atomic computation unit to represent complex numbers and/or 2x2 matrices could be ideal for AI etc.
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I have the opposite feeling: balanced ternary naturally removes the ickiness of twos-complement arithmetic and the unbalanced MIN_INT.
I was actually mucking with ChatGPT about possible "post-binary" architectures.
Ternary computers were around almost 70 years ago, and first posited well over 100 years ago.
Maybe ChatGPT isn't the best place to do research.
Base 4 isn't substantially different from base 2 except in granularity.
There's a somewhat famous result that base e gives the best expected density for representing numbers, but fractional (and especially irrational) bases are inconvenient for real-world quantities. So ternary is theoretically the best integer choice, but binary has practical advantages for electronic logic.