I’ve been slightly obsessed with Setun in spite of never totally understanding its inner workings. I once found an emulator in javascript which is probably just a google away. Unfortunately for a monolinguist like myself I couldn’t make head nor tail of the Russian labels. There was an interesting ‘art book’ written about Setun (in english/german) which I purchased. Has some neat photos, a good interview with the inventor and a cool aesthetic: http://neural.it/2008/09/francis-hunger-setun-an-inquiry-into-the-soviet-ternary-computer/ but it isn’t a technical exegesis.
Thanks for the link, as it seems to get a bit deeper into the way it worked, not just why.
There’s some exploration of them for Quantum Dots. That’s really esoteric. I did find something more people will understand: NAND, NOR, and SRAM done in ternary logic at 180nm.
An interesting exercise is to come up with a universal gate for ternary logic. I believe this is a solution. (Edit: looked it up, turns out not to be that hard.)
Oddly enough, building the constants (from unknown wire signals) in a one-gate system seems to be difficult and I’m not sure if it’s possible. For a contrast, it’s trivial in binary logic because NAND(x, x) = NOT(x) and NAND(x, NOT(x)) = 1.
I’ve been slightly obsessed with Setun in spite of never totally understanding its inner workings. I once found an emulator in javascript which is probably just a google away. Unfortunately for a monolinguist like myself I couldn’t make head nor tail of the Russian labels. There was an interesting ‘art book’ written about Setun (in english/german) which I purchased. Has some neat photos, a good interview with the inventor and a cool aesthetic: http://neural.it/2008/09/francis-hunger-setun-an-inquiry-into-the-soviet-ternary-computer/ but it isn’t a technical exegesis.
Thanks for the link, as it seems to get a bit deeper into the way it worked, not just why.
Hmm. Why do I get the feeling it was rediscovered as Joy and lives on as Factor
There’s some exploration of them for Quantum Dots. That’s really esoteric. I did find something more people will understand: NAND, NOR, and SRAM done in ternary logic at 180nm.
http://www.ijsr.net/archive/v3i11/MTMxMTE0MDI%3D.pdf
Also found a ternary, content-addressable memory:
https://web.stanford.edu/class/archive/ee/ee371/ee371.1066/handouts/TernaryCam89.pdf
There’s an old ternary computer emulator, if you’re curious: http://tunguska.sourceforge.net/about.html
An interesting exercise is to come up with a universal gate for ternary logic. I believe this is a solution. (Edit: looked it up, turns out not to be that hard.)
Oddly enough, building the constants (from unknown wire signals) in a one-gate system seems to be difficult and I’m not sure if it’s possible. For a contrast, it’s trivial in binary logic because NAND(x, x) = NOT(x) and NAND(x, NOT(x)) = 1.