this post was submitted on 19 Oct 2025
29 points (77.4% liked)
Programming
23426 readers
68 users here now
Welcome to the main community in programming.dev! Feel free to post anything relating to programming here!
Cross posting is strongly encouraged in the instance. If you feel your post or another person's post makes sense in another community cross post into it.
Hope you enjoy the instance!
Rules
Rules
- Follow the programming.dev instance rules
- Keep content related to programming in some way
- If you're posting long videos try to add in some form of tldr for those who don't want to watch videos
Wormhole
Follow the wormhole through a path of communities !webdev@programming.dev
founded 2 years ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
This video confuses at least three different concepts - quantum uncertainty, ternary computers, and "unknown" values.
Ternary computers are just not as good as binary computers. The way silicon works, it's always going to be much much slower.
"Unknown" values can be useful - they are common in SystemVerilog for example. But you rarely just have true, false and unknown, so it makes zero sense to bake that into the hardware. Verilog has 4 values - true, false, unknown and disconnected. VHDL has something like 9!
And even then the "unknown" isn't as great as you might think. It's basically poor-man's symbolic execution and is unable to cope with things like
let foo = some_unknown_value ? true : true. Yes that does happen and you won't like the "solution".High level programming concepts like
optionwill always map more cleanly onto binary numbers.Overall, very confused video that is trying to make it sound like there's some secret forgotten architecture or alternative history when there definitely isn't.
I top linked the most recently published video mostly for the introductory breakdown in ternary logic equivalence, but the interview with the ternary researcher, Dr Bos, also linked in the description above includes a number of corrections and accurate description of the subject.
Yeah, definitely not a lost art or anything, as physical ternary signals already have applications in communication like high data rate interfaces. Still, would be interesting to see ternary expand into logic domains with emerging developments in TCMOS research.