In the world of computing, we’ve long accepted that two is enough. Binary - that austere system of 0's and 1's - powers every modern computer, smartphone, and smart toaster. It’s simple, reliable, and has been refined over decades into an industrial juggernaut.

But what if I told you that two isn’t always the best number? What if there was a way to represent more information with the same number of digits, to make negation trivial, to sidestep the need for a separate sign bit?

That’s where ternary comes in. Base-3 computing. And no, this isn’t just theoretical. I actually built one. Not in hardware (yet), but in Python.