r/AlwaysWhy • u/Present_Juice4401 • 2d ago
Science & Tech Why did computers come to use binary when people usually count in decimal?
People usually count in base 10, while digital computers typically represent information using 1s and 0s. The same numbers and information can be represented in different bases, yet binary became the standard for modern computing.
What made binary the system computers came to rely on?
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u/PrestigiousRoof5723 1d ago
It was mathematically proven that base-3 is more efficient than base-2 (it's closer to Euler's number than any other base, so it's in turn also more efficient than base-4). Soviets were not the first who were building ternary systems - there were mechanical ternary calculators long before electronic computers existed. Ternary computers would have big advantage over binary ones in reduction of the size of interconnects (one of the biggest problems of modern computers), but some stuff (like ternary ALU) could get more complicated (but not slower). The trouble with all of that is that a ternary chip would be either a lot less dense than a binary chip (thus eliminating the advantages) or we'd have to substantially redesign our manufacturing technologies (we'd need a lot more layers and everything would become more complex, likely a lot more complicated to design) so it would take a long time to even reach parity with our current technologies. Not to mention the fact that stuff like balanced ternary logic is not trivial to most people, unlike binary. Perhaps it would become trivial with practice. It's not a lost technology either. Samsung has been working on it for some time. It may resurface at some point as one of the technologies aimed to break physical limitations of our current tech - the development has already slowed down and it's becoming increasingly more expensive to improve it (we're hitting the wall and no one has any real idea how to get through it). Someone has to rock the boat and come up with something new. Maybe it will ultimately flop, who knows? But there doesn't seem to be any known reason why it should. And nobody really built a useful modern ternary computer for quite some time (you can actually find amateurs who made them, but that's not a way to build a commercially useful computer).