Possibly. I brought up ternary or quaternary to hardware guys on Schneier's blog. I considered them since they shouldn't be much harder to work with than Boolean. In theory. That led me to two reasons that Boolean prevailed over most: simple rules allowed easy transformation and verification by computers; just two states means you can aim for high noise immunity at the gate level vs one with more precision required for its analog implementation.

However, there is research in the other stuff. Here is one of the papers I found:

http://facta.junis.ni.ac.rs/eae/fu2k51/bundalo.pdf

There were also other types of logic used in digital with interesting advantages. Two good ones, one for speed and one for reliability, are below. I particularly found the computer made with diode logic to be pretty amazing.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Emitter-coupled_logic

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Diode_logic

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/D-17B

Don't forget ternary content addressable memory (TCAM), which is common in contemporary network routers because it turns out having a third state to mean "don't care" is incredibly useful:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Content-addressable_memory#Ter...