Quantum computing is here. These people are already selling quantum mainframes
with humungous capabilities to the government and industry (e.g. Google, NASA,
Lockheed Martin):http://www.dwavesys.com/Nothing wrong with revisiting what we
learned in school. The D-Wave people should give going old-school a shot and
take a look at updating the Shannon-Hartley law we all learned in school. Maybe
then they could get past their quantum decoherence deficiencies and quell
doubters' objections.Unimagined in 1970s data processing is the quantum bit,
the qubit, a bit with an additional "superposition state" (basically true and
false at the same time). Would a qubit be considered binary or ternary? If
ternary, it would have asymmetric values: two states plus a superposition of
the other two states.The concepts of binary, ternary, decimal and hexadecimal
are unified because they all always represent a whole definite integer value
when considered outside of the context of any particular computing machine.
Extended numerical representations such as twos-complement, decimal points,
floating point, etc. are created at the whim of a machine's designers and
programmers (firmware, OS and application).But, now qubits supersede classical
data processing numeric representation with quantum, pending value, numeric
representation and create the need for a whole new vocabulary. Schrödinger's
cat demands a fresher pidgin (pun intended), so to speak. With regard to the
usage of the word "hexadecimal," I think you're arguing the evolving conceptual
semantics of a polyseme. No winning when you debate something like that, a
little dialectic however, goes a long way.Harry
> Date: Sun, 8 Dec 2013 21:36:20 -0600
> From: [email protected]
> Subject: Re: Check out Ternary "flip-flap-flop"
> To: [email protected]
>
> On Sun, 8 Dec 2013 20:58:27 -0600, Joel C. Ewing wrote:
>
> >On 12/08/2013 05:23 PM, Ed Finnell wrote:
> >> _Ternary "flip-flap-flop"_
> >> (http://www.goldenmuseum.com/1411FlipFlap_engl.html)
> >>
> >> This is pretty old stuff. Think the advantages were canceled out by
> >> 'indeterminate' states. Some of the new quantum stuff has similar
> >> possibilities.
> >>
> >
> >The Soviet Union designed and built computers based on ternary logic
> >(Setun, Setun-70) for several decades starting in 1958. They were less
> >expensive to produce and more electrically efficient to run than
> >binary-oriented hardware of comparable computational power, and were
> >actually an astute choice when the Soviet Union was trying to maximize
> >results with limited resources.
> >
> I wonder what the states were, electronically? Positive, ground, and
> negative?
> And whether it was possible to build a ternary flipflapflop with fewer
> tubes/transistors than a binary flipflop.
>
> Of course, "tri-state" bus transceivers are old stuff: 0, 1, and
> high-impedance
> for uncommitted -- "let someone else decide." I believe the original S/360
> bus
> and tag cables didn't do that; rather they used NPN (I think) emitter
> followers
> with resistive pulldowns in the terminators.
>
> -- gil
>
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