Pick 96 - Binary Thinking

 In our world of digital reality, there can only be one of two answers to any problem: black or white, yes or no, stop or go, love it or list it, buy or sell, now or later, fast or slow, good or bad, the right door or the left one.

 

Like the young man in Frank R Stockten's 1882 short story, The Lady or the Tiger, we are faced with issues that seem to offer only two possible solutions. All too often, both solutions have negative consequences.

 

Since computers are digital devices, they only recognize binary data. Every program, video, image, and character of text is represented in binary.

 

Is it trinary or ternary?

A ternary computer (also called a trinary computer) is a computer that uses ternary logic (three possible values) instead of the more common binary logic (two possible values) in its calculations.

 

Mathematically, ternary coding is more efficient than binary coding. It is little used in computation because technology for binary processing is already established and the implementation of ternary coding is more complicated, but remains relevant in algorithms that use decision trees and in communications. Perhaps we should add that while computers work best with binary logic, such restrictive thinking should not constrain the human mind. Otherwise, we may doom ourselves to resolving global conflicts with war or peace solutions.