The Future
With the advent of mass-produced binary components for computers, ternary computers have diminished to a small footnote in the history of computing. However, ternary logic's elegance and efficiency is predicted by Donald Knuth to bring them back into development in the future. One possible way this could happen is by combining an optical computer with the ternary logic system. A ternary computer using fiber optics could use dark as 0 and two orthogonal polarizations of light as 1 and −1. IBM also reports infrequently on ternary computing topics (in its papers), but it is not actively engaged in it.
The Josephson junction has been proposed as a balanced ternary memory cell, using circulating superconducting currents, either clockwise, counterclockwise, or off. "The advantages of the proposed memory circuit are capability of high speed computation, low power consumption and very simple construction with less number of elements due to the ternary operation."
In 2009, a ternary quantum computer was proposed which thus uses qutrits rather than qubits. When the number of basic states of quantum element is d, it is called qudit.
Read more about this topic: Ternary Computer
Famous quotes containing the word future:
“The past is of no importance. The present is of no importance. It is with the future that we have to deal. For the past is what man should not have been. The present is what man ought not to be. The future is what artists are.
The facts: nothing matters but the facts: worship of the facts leads to everything, to happiness first of all and then to wealth.”
—Edmond De Goncourt (1822–1896)
“The most remarkable aspect of the transition we are living through is not so much the passage from want to affluence as the passage from labor to leisure.... Leisure contains the future, it is the new horizon.... The prospect then is one of unremitting labor to bequeath to future generations a chance of founding a society of leisure that will overcome the demands and compulsions of productive labor so that time may be devoted to creative activities or simply to pleasure and happiness.”
—Henri Lefebvre (b. 1901)