Until very recently, there was no real reason to create a trinary logic system for use on computers, because computers ran strictly on binary. A circuit was either on or off. 1 or 0. True or false.

      In the past few years, however, scientists made new discoveries. They found that by shining certain lasers on a bacterium called bacteriorhodopsin, they could control its color. A purple color could indicate a negative value, a yellow color a positive value, and a mixture of the two a netural value. Looks like trinary to us. You can read more about that from Science News On-line, 3/8/97.

      Another team of reasearchers at IBM discovered that, by manipulating the core of the two elements in chloroform - carbon and hydrogen - they could perform a simple database query at the molecular level. Because quantum particles can effectively be in every possible place at the same time, it might be possible to use them for super-fast computer memory and logic banks. This really has more to do with fuzzy logic than trinary logic, but the two are very closely linked. For more information, see the article in the San Jose Mercury News, 3/28/98, Page 1A and 5A, "Breakthrough made on new era of computing" by Pete Carey.

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