Programming Language for Ternary Computing

Neural nets usually use 32-bit floats for weights. There is a rapid trend of using quantization. There are already papers describing 2-bit quantization strategies – either quantization-aware training or post-training quantization. Less precision means larger & faster models (current utility), buuuut more importantly you can start to think about different substrates for implementation – analog or optical seems to be viable paths.

In case anyone has missed the reference: https://thedailywtf.com/articles/what_is_truth_0x3f_

Paula Bean still pushing for unary computing: "brillant".

If you count communication signalling, you do not need to go that exotic. Gigabit Ethernet has 5 levels.

At the chip level, it is quite common to see tri-state pins, where the states are: high, low, high-impedidence (e.g, let the rest of the circut set the voltage level). You also sometimes see chips that want a to support a handful of potential values have a pin that can be pulled to multiple intermediate voltages; although you typically hardwire the value with resistors.

If you go back far enough, decimal computers were common. The first "real" computer was thr ENIAC which was finished in 1945, and was decimal based. Although even before that, there were more primitive digital computational devices of both the binary and decimal variaty.

Which is also why I don't see any reason why we'd need a new "language" to use ternary computing. I'm not even sure what a library would do; if you have arbitrary precision ints and/or floats, that's basically all you need for an adapter. For instance, a ternary computer might be able to store a tri-state value more efficiently, but you'd still have the exact same code to resolve it ("case 0: {} case 1: {} case 2: {}"), and it's not like it suddenly mandates that all your binary conditions grow a third clause lest the hardware combust. A trit having more room than a binary value requires isn't news when a lot of our binary values are already consuming a full byte, if not at times a full machine word, as it is.

I've seen one other person in the past many years who A: believed ternary computing was very important and B: was absolutely impossible to convince that there is literally nothing a ternary computer can do that a binary computer can not.

But there is literally nothing a ternary computer can do that a binary computer can not. The reasons why it may be interesting relate to being one possible avenue for squeezing one last drop of hardware performance out of a system that has otherwise reached its limits, but it is minimally interesting from a software perspective.

I think no one is particularly interested in it at this time because there's no step after that; there's no "super ternary" you can go to after that, and for various mathematical reasons stepping up to 4 is much, much less helpful if not actively a step backwards (it turns out that in many ways, 3 is the optimum; actually it's e, but 3 is the closest you can get to that). An optical computer might go faster the next generation, a quantum computer can add more qubits, transistors can be cooled and stacked and built out of graphene and all sorts of other things, but a ternary-ness is a dead end. It's the last thing you do when all else fails.