What If Computers Didn’t Think in 0s and 1s?

The forgotten architecture that math says is more efficient than binary and why we use binary anyway

Every device you own runs on two symbols: 0 and 1. We treat this as a law of nature, like gravity. It isn’t. It’s an engineering decision (a very good one) but a decision, and for a few decades in the 20th century a small group of people bet on a different number.

They bet on three.

This is the story of ternary computing: why it’s elegant, why mathematics actually prefers it to binary, why it lost anyway, and why it keeps quietly coming back.

The trit

A bit answers one question: is there current, or not? Two states.

A trit (ternary digit) answers a richer question. Instead of just present / absent, it can also read the direction of the current: one way, none, the other way. Three states on the same wire.

bit   →   0   1
trit  →   −   0   +

That’s the whole idea. But the interesting part isn’t that there are three symbols — it’s which three you pick.

Balanced ternary: the prettiest number system

The naïve choice is {0, 1, 2}. The beautiful choice is balanced ternary: {−1, 0, +1}, usually written {−, 0, +}.

Donald Knuth, in The Art of Computer Programming, called it “perhaps the…