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To understand multi-state CPUs and the technological advantages that they possess, one must first take a minute to understand how CPUs currently run and the differences between the current and proposed systems.

Currently, CPUs run in a binary-state environment, meaning that they are solely capable of recognizing data that is represented by a sequence of 1s and 0s. For instance, the binary equivalent of the letter “A” is “01000001”. One of the drawbacks of binary code is that a one character letter such as “A” has to be converted into an 8 character string in order for the computer to recognize it. To further illustrate this point let us take the word “binary” and convert it into its binary equivalent of “011000100110100101101110011000010111001001111001”. This increase in character string length is a major obstacle in increasing the processing speeds of today’s computers.

Bring in the Multi-state CPU. Instead of using the traditional two states to represent the information, they will use a number of states; most likely ten to begin with for the numbers 0 through 9. This will mean a major breakthrough in processing speed. As stated earlier, any character is represented in binary code as an eight digit string of with each character representing two possibilities. Therefore the number of possibilities for a string is 2x2x2x2x2x2x2x2 or 256 combinations. Compare that to a multi-state CPA, where each character has 10 possibilities and we can attain a number of combinations far greater than 256 in only a three character string: 10x10x10 or 1000 combinations. Using three character strings instead of eight means that the word "binary" could be represented in 18 characters rather than 48, roughly just over a third of the size. This binary would vastly reduce the amount of time that the computer has to spend going through the process of translating the characters in binary, and then back again later. However, this is only the beginning, the ultimate goal of multi-state CPUs is to have it so that they can understand other characters such as letters and punctuation marks without having to first translate them into their equivalents.