Ternary computers aren't particularly new. The Soviets made some, and I'm sure the Western world did too.

I guess quantum computing will find its niche. From what I have read, quantum computing seems to be more about probability computations (If not, enlighten me. This subject is pretty confusing).
I guess most problems don't lend themselves well to this kind of processor, many problems don't even scale well to parallel processing.

you are already using a quantum computer.

Quote: Original post by ibebrett
you are already using a quantum computer.

are you referring to the human brain?

besides all the nonsense, i personally can't wait for memristors to creep into ram, ssd, and cpu.

it will drastically reduce power needs, and thus massively change the computers design.

i'm interested how the non-need for ram will change os, applications, programming in general. in theory, we could have just one kind of storage by then. we'll see..

i want graphene memristors, actually. up to 100ghz, instant on and off..

there's one thing we know, the future'll be fun.

till then, i plan on getting some sandy bridge fun.

Quote: Original post by Ravuya
Ternary computers aren't particularly new. The Soviets made some, and I'm sure the Western world did too.

It wasn't just "The Soviets". All the major powers and several major schools globally invested in building their own computing engines.

Analog computers were also popular for a while. Ultimately they lost out because the benefits of determinism won over the benefits of arbitrary precision.

It seems the biggest challenge would be creating components to convert bits into current and current back into bits. I guess you could use some sort of resistor ladder, and would only need one resistor ladder for each decoding unit.

I think if anything is going to "change programming forever" it's going to be the shift from low level programming languages to high level programming languages.

When you think of things like the change from binary to whatever, the change from low level to high level makes it somewhat trivial to the majority of programmers as it has little, if any, relevance to the average programmer of the future.

edit: Even something like a really advanced Kodu(sp? the MS graphical programming language for children to learn programming) could be the future.

Quote: Original post by way2lazy2care
I think if anything is going to "change programming forever" it's going to be the shift from low level programming languages to high level programming languages.

For the most part, this has already happened...what are you talking about?

bools could be true, false, OR maybe!