Third base

[JEREMY GARDINER]

An interesting discussion of the reasoning behind the choice of 3 as a base can be found here:
 
http://www.americanscientist.org/template/AssetDetail/assetid/14405?&print=yes
 
Jeremy Gardiner
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  Jonathan Post <jvospost3 at gmail.com> wrote:

  The way that I remember the Russian balanced trinary computing, the premise was that 3 came closer to "e" than did 2, so trinary should in some sense be closer to optimal than binary. I don't know the Russian for "flip-flap-flop" as better than flip-flop, in circuitry.  The tale was that the advantage was wasted in a clumsy representation of decimal in the new system. Of course, that was a tale during the Cold War (say when I was at Caltech 1968-1973), possibly promulgated as a joke by John Todd, Oliver Selfridge, or another fiend of Alan Turing's,  and could easily have been disparagement, or disinformation.
   
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