The benefits of ternary computing are best with demonstrated. A simple example:
A waiter walks up to a table of two and asks “is everybody ready to order?”. One of them responds, “I’m not sure”. Then the other says, “Now we are”.
(Edit: I didn’t really ask a question, so it may not seem like a riddle. To some people, when they imagine it, this scene makes perfect sense, so it’s not much of a riddle to them. To others, it’s sort of bizarre, and so the “question” - how is this possible, or what happened - is obvious. Then you can consider the answer. In any case, this is a very simple demonstration of ternary logic, and much more complicated riddles exist that all more or less build off of the same mechanism.)
In practice this answer is hardly different from saying Yes, since it's understood that the person saying Yes is just speaking for themselves and the waiter will wait for the other person to confirm.
Isn’t that the entire point, that it means “I’m ready but I don’t know about the other person”? If the first person was not ready they would say “no” because they know that they can’t possibly both be ready. Since the first person says “I’m not sure” and not “no” the second person can infer that the first person is ready, and since the second person is ready they can answer yes for both of them.
This point is brought up a lot, but it doesn’t account for all the details. The second person says “now we are”, immediately after the first said “I don’t know”. The “in practice” example explains the first statement, but not both of them.
A waiter walks up to a table of two and asks “is everybody ready to order?”. One of them responds, “I’m not sure”. Then the other says, “Now we are”.
(Edit: I didn’t really ask a question, so it may not seem like a riddle. To some people, when they imagine it, this scene makes perfect sense, so it’s not much of a riddle to them. To others, it’s sort of bizarre, and so the “question” - how is this possible, or what happened - is obvious. Then you can consider the answer. In any case, this is a very simple demonstration of ternary logic, and much more complicated riddles exist that all more or less build off of the same mechanism.)