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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Computers that use something other than base 3 are a thing, or at least were a thing.
The Soviets experimented with ternary computers in the early day of digital computing.
An of course analogue computers that don’t use digital at all have also been built.
The way we use computers today with low or no voltage meaning 0 and high current meaning 1 lends itself to binary. You could build something wehre different voltage ranges mean different things, but that wold add complexity.
For example many computer today work with the logic that 0V to 0.8 V is a digital zero and 2V to 5V is a digital 1 and everything in between is not defined.
You would need to shrink the ranges to make room for a third range.
This would require a lot more work that just adding another wire that can also be either 1 or 0 and get your higher numbers by treating a bunch of wires together as a single thing.
Future computers that are based on optical components or quantum stuff may be built on base 3 or 4, or we may just keep using binary because everything else is binary and switching to a new system will be hard.
If you for example do things like polarized light you can easily transmit much more than two states with a single beam of light.
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