: Why are computers limited to 0s and 1s? Why can’t we use numbers like 2s and 3s for more Efficiency?
In: 17
– Circuit A can distinguish 2 different voltage levels.
– Circuit B can distinguish 4 different voltage levels.
Your question is “Why do we use Circuit A not Circuit B?” And the answer is that Circuit B costs [1] more than twice as much as Circuit A. So for efficiency you would want to replace Circuit B with two copies of Circuit A, and you’d still be able to distinguish 4 patterns: 00 01 10 11.
In theory, yes, you can make a computer that uses any number of digits. In practice, we always use 2 digits because that’s the most efficient [2].
[1] At this level costs are usually measured in size, power usage and heat.
[2] And also the simplest. And once you have a certain number of binary computers, you start to get “network effects.” Meaning that *even if* tomorrow someone makes a non-binary computer that’s more efficient, it will still struggle in the marketplace because we’ve already built a huge amount of infrastructure that assumes binary computers. All the circuit designs would need to fundamentally change, engineers and programmers would need to be re-trained, programming languages that assume binary would need to be replaced, programs and data files wouldn’t be compatible, and so on.
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