Ternary Logic and Digital Computing

By Martin Becker (‎martin‎) from Ulm.pm
Date: Tuesday, 21 August 2012 16:05
Duration: 40 minutes
Target audience: Any
Language: English
Tags: arithmetic computer emulation logic

Ternary or three-valued logic is a logic in which there are three truth values indicating true, false and some third value, often used to denote uncertainty or indefiniteness. A three-valued information unit is called a trit.

It would be technically feasible to build digital systems based on trits, using memory units with three distinct states (flip-flap-flops) and logic circuitry with three distinct input/output levels, like positive, negative and zero voltage.

This talk explores basic operations and other important properties for a hypothetical ternary computer, as implemented in the Perl library Math-Logic-Ternary. It turns out that ternary logic gives rise to uniqe features such as a very simple and symmetric numeral system.