The Bob/Ike/Qui Page

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      To develop the Bob/Ike/Qui Trinary Logic set, we looked at what the AND and OR gates actually did with the numbers in Boolean logic. Let's look at the OR gate first. In this gate, we say that the 1 has dominance. That is to say, output is a 1 anytime a 1 is present. You could say a 1 blocks a 0 in the OR gate. A 0 is only output if there is no 1 present. AND is just the opposite: output is only a 1 if there is no 0 present.

      [Blocks]


      Using that as a basis, we invented 3 new gates: BOB, IKE, and QUI. As you can see, BOB outputs a 2 anytime a 2 is input, a 1 anytime a 1 is input and not a 2, and 0 only if no other digits are input. IKE and QUI are similar, except the order of dominance is switched.

      [Tri-block]


      So here's another truth table, which brings us to disadvantage #1: its size. This table requires 9 rows, and it only has 2 inputs. A network with 3 inputs would require 27 rows, 4 inputs would require 81 rows, etc. (that's 3 to the power of number of inputs)
      p | q | p BOB q
---------------
2 | 2 | 2
2 | 1 | 2
2 | 0 | 2
1 | 2 | 2
1 | 1 | 1
1 | 0 | 1
0 | 2 | 2
0 | 1 | 1
0 | 0 | 0

      NED serves as our NOT gate, which switches 2 and 0 and leaves 1 alone (2->0, 1->1, 0->2)

      Below is a simple trinary network. What is the output if the input p is 2 and q is 1?
      [Trinary Network]

      The answer is 0.

      This whole system of 2's, 1's, and 0's is now approaching obsolete (even though it never left the theoretical stages). After many fruitless hours during U.S. History class spent staring at the truth table for the trinary half adder, we reached the decision that there was no practical way to develop a logical network (as the half-adder is all-important in terms of usefulness).

      A bit discouraged, we decided to forget the whole theory of merely copying Boolean logic and came up with a new idea, based more on getting the half-adder to work.

      [Negone]

      -1/0/1       

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