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Hegel 2.0: The imaginary history of ternary computing (2018)

The imaginary history of ternary computing

[1] McCulloch himself had contributed to the “theory of automata,” which invented gadgets and formulas, some—like Ross Ashby’s “homeostat” or Claude Shannon’s labyrinth-traversing “mouse”—passed around at conferences for show-and-tell, some given only in mathematics at once esoteric and brazenly applied to animals, machines, and cognition. This is in flat contradiction to the whole development of self-organizing systems, teaching machines that learn, self-improving game-playing devices that beat their inventors, etc… They have plenty of brilliant youngsters and, if they want to, they can supply them with everything they need from computors [ sic], living things, and books, including ours. The diagram—which Cowan does not explain in detail in his paper (though he might have said something off the cuff during the presentation)—points to the possibility that this kind of digital communicative automaton realizes only a part of a many-valued input/output world, not simplifying or compressing but contending as a separate set of binary principles with the many values it cannot contain.

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