Guest Editors' Comments

Abstract

MULTIPLE-VALUED logic has been the subject of considerable study during the past decade [1]-[3]. Indeed, there has been an annual symposium devoted exclusively to the subject since 1971. The Proceedings of these annual symposia provide a historical perspective to the developments in multiple-valued logic. Initially, researchers were most concerned with such problems as the determination of functionally complete sets of logical operators, functional minimization, and other switching theoretic and logical design problems. Only a few worked on the implementation of multiple-valued logic circuits [4], [5]. Another problem, which still exists, is functional representation. While the truth table for a 10 input m-valued function is inconveniently large for m = 2, it is intractably large for m > 2; and algebraic expressions for even relatively simple multiple-valued functions are typically quite complex.