We are all familiar with Binary, or at least I hope we are. Binary is consisting of two parts
or states- True or False, On or Off, 1 or 0. This is the basic unit of computers - bits and
Boolean logic. All computer data breaks down into bits (see table) and all
Boolean evaluations result in either true or false.
In the real world things are not always black and white (binary). This is
where fuzzy logic comes
in. In fuzzy logic could be simply described as giving things a possibility
of being a certain state (now a fuzzy logic expert might disagree with me on
that, so do some research of your own if you are stickler for the truth). So it has a 75% chance of being true, and a 53.7%
chance of being false. This makes more sense in more complicated examples.
Take color fuchsia. I might say it has a 75%
chance of being red, a 50% chance of being blue and 0% chance of being green.
The interesting thing is someone else might give it a different rating.
Now these variable ratings are nice, but what if I don't want something so
complicated, but more flexible then true and false?
I got to thinking, what would you call three states? At first I thought
Trinary, which is in fact a word, that means "Consisting of three parts", but it appears that
Ternary
is preferred. I personally prefer Trinary, but I guess I will use Ternary
since it appears preferred. For those of you who do much database development this
concept should be pretty straight forward since you have to deal with
null values,
where the value is unknown. So you have true, false and unknown.
How about four states? I guessed
Quadranary, which Google
finds hits for but no definition. It suggests
Quaternary,
which has the definition of "Consisting of four; in fours." That sounds
like what I am looking for. So what would these four states be? How
about Unknown, True, False and Maybe. You could argue that Unknown should
be Unlikely since that would be opposite of Maybe, but I like Unknown better.
So if you want to include Unlikely then you need five states. First I tried
Pentanary which returned
84 hits, but no definition. Looking at some of the hits it is used to
mean five parts or elements. It is even used in conjunction with Ternary
and
Quaternary, which looks promising! Then I tried
Quintenary which
returned 126 hits and no definition. It is used with Tertiary and
Quaternary to mean fifth level and there is also a reference to base-5. I
like Pentanary better since it is less likely to be confused with Quaternary.
I think 5 states is a very useful base system since you have Unknown, Likely, True,
False and Unlikely. Any more levels then this and you would be very fuzy.
To summarize:
| System |
|
States |
| Binary/Boolean |
|
True & False |
| Ternary |
|
Unknown, True, False |
| Quaternary |
|
Unknown, True, False, Maybe |
| Pentanary |
|
Unknown, Likely, True, False, Unlikely |
Would you suggest a system for six or more states? What would those
states be? I think odd numbered systems would be better then even numbered
systems since you would have an Unknown state, but maybe you might argue against
that. I am interested in your comments on this! If you know Latin
and would like to extend this system feel free to do so.
