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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On/off is easy to represent accurately in electronics with considerable speed & scale.
But it isn’t really the base that matters, it’s the fixed values that lend themselves to identifying operations, memory locations, values – things that you want for writing software (like Turing machines).
Analog computers typically approximate a continuous range of values but it’s much harder to make them programmable. They are good for some operations, eg. amplification. Fixed-purpose versions can be found in practically all audio & radio equipment.
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