[krapht]

Adding more states to an electronic system is trading robustness and noise insensitivity for better performance.

Think about it this way: as the number of states approaches infinity, you're back to analog computing.

It's a design parameter, not something that lets us break past limits on computational density, which right now is heat removal and quantum tunneling in transistors.

[hinkley]

What do you think would be harder to implement in a fab on a budget in the future? A chip full of large gates that can handle 7 voltage levels stably, or a chip with 5x [1] as many of the smallest gates that physics and logistics allow one to build?

[1] If memory servers, adders and cache access and a bunch of other logic typically require O(nlog₂n) gates in binary, but O(nlog₃n) in ternary, Which means as the native integer size increases, bases greater than 2 scale better.

[krapht]

There's a huge constant factor involved, which is why we still use binary. As in many algorithms, asymptotic analysis doesn't tell the full story.