this post was submitted on 29 Apr 2025
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I don’t think that’s really true - a thorough understanding of Boolean logic is pretty essential to programming imho. I think you want to keep in mind the goal is not to prove you are smarter than the first chapter of your textbook, just to note the ideas and patterns it is introducing.
I mean I'm definitely noticing the patterns. I'm just frustrated that someone who is supposedly an expert in logic let something like that slip. Not assuming that logical negation means "opposite" is one of the first things they teach you. For example, if we were thinking in opposites, the negation of "all" would be "none." But the negation of "all" is "not all", where the negation of "none" is "at least one."
That’s not how it’s usually going to work in discrete - that’s the message the book is trying to communicate to you.
Think like an engineer designing a computer. The state of the weather is something that we are introducing as a binary here - bad or not bad, good or not good.
I’m sure the next few chapters will talk about things like truth tables, right? Try to imagine what those would look like with a “trinary” logic system. Remember math is a tool we use to abstract reality efficiently.
I tool a sql class, so if the trinary logic is True, False, and Null then I don't have to imagine it, I already learned it.
I suppose you could have "true", "false", and "unknown" too. That could be interesting. But it wouldn't look all that different - AND compares the values and returns the less certain of the two. OR compares values and returns the more certain of the two. Unknown inverted is still unknown. Not that hard.
Qbits have four states, I think? Now those are fun truth tables.
Can you construct a truth table for a trinary logic system half adder?
Probably? I don't feel like doing homework rn, though, and what would be the point?
Some programs might have reasons to add an additional truth value, (for example, most databases include "NULL") but trinary would be a terrible choice for hardware. The tolerances are just much more forgiving when you're detecting the presence/absence of a charge than trying to measure multiple distinct states.