Why do computers work in base 2, as opposed to base (higher number here)?

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I realise (/think?) that CPUs essentially treat two different voltages as a 1 or 0, but what stops us from using 3 or more different voltages? Wouldn’t that exponentially increase the CPU’s throughput by allowing for decisions with greater than two outcomes to be calculated in one cycle? This would presumably mean that a LOT of stuff written for base 2 would need to be updated to base 3 (in this example), but I can’t imagine that’s the only reason we haven’t done this.

I feel like I’ve explained that poorly, but hopefully you get the gist.

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Anonymous 0 Comments

Because balanced ternary gets no love. For logical operations, you get a true and a false like you do today, but what do you do with the third state? A maybe? A shrug?

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