Electronics > Beginners

Why binary is represented by two bits 0 and 1 and not three bits?

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tggzzz:

--- Quote from: Canis Dirus Leidy on October 27, 2019, 09:02:49 am ---
--- Quote from: tggzzz on October 27, 2019, 08:52:49 am ---Analogue computers work by solving differential equations.
Electronic analogue computers use opamps to integrate, add, and multiply.
Mechanical analogue computers use cogs, wheels, motors, wires.

--- End quote ---
And real programmers use water: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Water_integrator :)

--- End quote ---

And real electronic engineers use gas for their logic circuits: https://www.symscape.com/blog/fluidic-logic

I once had a job assessing whether to replace fluidic logic with a microprocessor; I recommended against it.

The logic was on unmanned offshore oil rigs with zero electricity for safety reasons. Adding electricity was possible but had no advantages and many disadvantages.

tooki:
I think the take-home message here is that often, when people ask "why is x always done like this?" or "why don't we do x [some unusual way]?", they are blithely unaware that all the other ways typically have been tried before, and the reason x became the dominant way is because it has clear advantages.

Ideas aren't nearly as unique and special as people think they are. It's implementations that are difficult!

konzill:
Looking at the Wikipedia page on trinary logic, it turns out that there isn't even a consensus on how to build a trinary truth table. The page lists half a dozen different trinary logic systems. So yes it goes back to, its rarely done because it adds complexity. 

Even at a basic level having to differentiate three voltage levels, instead of two would make a circuit more suceptable to noise.

Syntax Error:
@tip.can19 - Binary and it's associated Boolean logic also fits our statefull view of the world; states such as yes-no, up-down, on-off, in-out, high-low, push-pull, mark-space, set-reset, left-right, true-false. Alternate states like whatever, dunno and Brexit, don't work when making decisions as they are not finite states.

Being caught between finite states is being in the noise. A transition between two finite states is the hysteresis. In digital, this is the rate of change of voltage to what is regarded as a stable logic 0 or 1. Real-world, this might involve the thinking time about which shirt to wear on a date; the flowery one or the clean one?

Geek out on Boolean algebra https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boolean_algebra
Geek out on Hysteresis https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hysteresis
Geek out on the Finite State Machine https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Finite-state_machine

P.S. Thinking about this, in data analysis, it is possible for an outcome to have three states; an outcome can be none, one or many. I believe this none/one/many concept was created by Australian Aboriginal people tens of thousands of years ago. Clever dudes.

Vtile:
Why binary not ternary.. I suppose one interesting reason is that all widely used number systems are even based, 2,8,10,16,60.

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