Ask HN: Would humanity benefit from designing a new computing platform

There was at least one computer in the past that used quinary (if that is the term), i.e. it's vacuum tubes had five distinct voltage levels IIRC. This was done because less voltage would have meant more tubes, hence more material, more power consumption, and, importantly, more points of failure; more than five levels would've been too difficult / error prone to distinguish, also resulting in less efficiency.

It is not out of the question that some silicon blueprint could or does result in a component which can safely distinguish between more than two states.

> We could even let go of the 0s and 1s, and replace it with something else.

We could, but I don't think there's much of a point. 1s and 0s are easy to work with because it's simple to represent their absolute state with complete precision. Storing, retrieving, analyzing and operating-on non-binary data is computationally expensive for minimal gain in performance.

The end user hardware isn't perfect, but you'll be hard-pressed to match the efficiency of a classical computer.

Think of evolution. You have reptile brain inside, still. X86 is a base of 120% of products. Want to fight court battle against Microsoft?

Why reinvent the wheel?