What was the motivation behind making a tryte equal to three trits? Seems counter-intuitive that a byte contains more combinations than a tryte—at least from a semantical perspective.
-
Not sure this is an IOTA question. IOTA didn't "invent" trytes. It might be more appropriate on the Computer Science or even English Stack Exchange.– HelmarMar 1, 2018 at 14:17
-
2I think that the tryte term was always used as a undefined collection of trits and only in IOTA context a tryte is a collection of 3 trits.– blockminedMar 1, 2018 at 16:12
-
1@Helmar Yes, but didn't IOTA define a tryte as three trits for this project? I don't see this definition mentioned anywhere else.– shoeMar 1, 2018 at 19:20
-
2Others use e.g. 6 trits (en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ternary_numeral_system#Tryte), but also in the past, computers had 6 or 9 bits in a byte (en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Byte). So I think this is a valid question for this StackExchange why IOTA chose 3 (but probably there is no good answer there, let's see :D)– mihi ♦Mar 1, 2018 at 20:37
-
I’m voting to close this question because it is about the legacy-network and it is a good idea to keep only Shimmer/ShimmerEVM and latest IOTA Chrysalis questions– Antonio NardellaApr 24 at 14:04
Add a comment
|
2 Answers
Trits are not very readable by humans, so English letters and a separator ('9') were used for combinations of 3 trits. Calling them "characters" would require to add "used in IOTA addresses" sometimes which is not convenient. Long story short, I decided to call them "trytes", that term wasn't used anywhere else anyway.
Regarding a byte being able to store more data, conventional computers operate with computer words, not bytes. Bytes don't longer matter much.
answered May 12, 2018 at 17:32
-
Right, I meant that "tryte" hadn't been used in IOTA and Jinn (a trinary processor). May 13, 2018 at 19:46
I didn't find any IOTA specific source to explain the choice to use trytes made of three trits.
Probably 27 being the number of all possible different combinations of 3 trits, (3^3), then 3 trits is the best choice if you want to use the letters in English alphabet (26), plus an additional character (9), to represent numbers in this notation.
