Abstract
An alternative basis for development of a completely incompatible digital
infrastructure is presented here. This minimizes the
potential for leakage of information, particularly malware and other
covert content from our existing digital infrastructure.
This effort can be described as taking security through obscurity
as a fundamental design principle.
Using base 3 instead of base 2 maximizes the incompatibility.
This suggests that
word-sizes should be measured in trits, not bits. The numbers 3, 9, 27
and 81 show up naturally in our new world, so we suggest the use of a
3-trit trybble, a 9-trit tryte, and a 27-trit word.
This has strong consequences
across the board, from digital circuits to character codes and programming
language semantics.
While this work began as something of a joke, there are some very
serious reasons that ternary logic may have value. One ternary digit, a trit,
can represent 1.58 bits. Thus, a ternary computer with 21-trit words
could handle values slightly larger than a 32-bit binary computer can handle.
One of the limiting factors in high-end computer architecture has long been
the density of interconnect wiring between the system components. Reducing the
number of wires to 64% may well be worth the cost even if the move to ternary
increases the total number of transistors required to build a computer.
- Standard Ternary Logic
Being a treatise on Kleene logic including observations on the
utility of the consensus and accept-any operators
and a discussion of minimization of combinatorial logic circuits.
- Fast Ternary Addition
Being an exploration of the possibility of building a
high-speed ternary arithmetic logic unit, wherein carry-lookahead
logic is presented for ternary incrementers and an unsigned ternary
adder, and it is noted that, while the carry lookahead problem remains
unsolved for balanced ternary adders, it appears that they will be
more complex than unsigned ternary adders but just as fast.
- Heptavintimal Encoding of Ternary Values
Being a brief treatise on the utility of the heptavintimal number
system, to whit, the use of base 27 to represent triads of ternary
digits with single alphanumeric symbols.
- TerSCII:
Ternary Standard Code for Information Interchange
Being a coding system for letters, numbers and symbols particularly
well suited for use on ternary computers and correcting some serious
deficiencies of the now common Unicode system.
- Number Representations for Ternary Computers
Being a brief treatise on the division of words into trytes and
trybbles, as well as the equivalence of balanced ternary and biased
representations and the application of this to floating point numbers.
- Fast Ternary Multiplication and Division
Being an unfinished discourse on multiplication by constants and by
variables, as well as a discussion of both unsigned and balanced Ternary
division.
- Ternary Data Types for C Programmers
Being a complete library supporting 9 and 27 trit integer arithmetic
using a binary-coded ternary or BCT data representation, suitable for
experimenting with ternary computing on binary computers.
- Binary Coded Ternary and Ternary Coded Binary
Being a description of how binary and ternary computing can coexist using
encodings in each universe for data representations native to the other.
- The Trillium Architecture
Being an unfinished section about a small computer architecture
with a 9-trit word and a 19,682 word address space.
- The Tritium Architecture
Being an unfinished section about a large computer architecture
with a 27-trit word and a potential 7.6 teratryte address space.