I see Trump is vying for membership in the ICP?
I learned a while ago of the existence of old Soviet ternary computers and have been doing some reading about how a ternary computer would operate different from a binary one.
In a binary system, the smallest unit of data is the bit (binary digit). What would the smallest unit of data be in a ternary system?
like this
God I hope I'm not coming down with something. I went to bed with a bit of a sore throat and woke up this mornig feelig like I'd been gargling broken glass.
Time to load up on tea with honey and lemon, I guess.
Popped into #LambdaMOO for a birthday celebration that took place inside my sushi restaurant. This got me to thinking. I wonder if it's possible to tie my restaurant's code into the birthday machine somehow so that people can get free food on their birthday.
Isaac Ji Kuo
in reply to Jonathan Lamothe • • •Sensitive content
A trit.
What's really a trip is balanced ternary. It's so elegant it almost hurts.
Instead of trit values being 0, 1, and 2, the trit values are -1, 0, and 1. Each range of numbers is naturally balanced around 0, and multiplying a number by -1 is simply multiplying each digit by -1.
Jonathan Lamothe
in reply to Isaac Ji Kuo • •Jonathan Lamothe
in reply to Jonathan Lamothe • •Isaac Ji Kuo
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It works the same as in decimal, except there's no need for a sign on either the mantissa or the exponent.
Base 2 floating point is a bit different because it can skip the initial 1 on the mantissa (it's always a 1, except for the edge case of zero; there needs to be exceptions for dealing with zero).
Jonathan Lamothe
in reply to Isaac Ji Kuo • •Digital Mark λ ☕️ 🕹 👽
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A tit! Er, trit.
So instead of counting 1, 2, 4, 8, 16, like a normal person, it's 1, 3, 9, 27, 81.
I'm too binary-conditioned to use that even as a jokey thing. Making a VM to try it out would be hard.