https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Balanced_ternary has some enjoyable advantages over more conventional number systems; numbers are a lot shorter than in binary, but arithmetic is nearly as easy, and it accommodates negative numbers naturally and inherently rather than through a length-dependent hack like twos' complement. under certain plausible assumptions about your available hardware, it has about a 5.7% device complexity advantage over binary (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Radix_economy), though those assumptions often do not hold in practice
so i thought it would make a good example of path-dependent divergences: this alternative system is arguably better than binary, decimal, vigesimal, or sexagesimal, but not by enough to make it worth the incompatibility in the real world
an extraterrestrial society with a different history, and thus no need for compatibility with c, ascii, ttl, and synchronous-logic eda platforms, might have taken a different path
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Balanced_ternary has some enjoyable advantages over more conventional number systems; numbers are a lot shorter than in binary, but arithmetic is nearly as easy, and it accommodates negative numbers naturally and inherently rather than through a length-dependent hack like twos' complement. under certain plausible assumptions about your available hardware, it has about a 5.7% device complexity advantage over binary (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Radix_economy), though those assumptions often do not hold in practice
so i thought it would make a good example of path-dependent divergences: this alternative system is arguably better than binary, decimal, vigesimal, or sexagesimal, but not by enough to make it worth the incompatibility in the real world
an extraterrestrial society with a different history, and thus no need for compatibility with c, ascii, ttl, and synchronous-logic eda platforms, might have taken a different path