Optical Processing

I currently work as a contracter for processing patents for the USPTO, so I get to see a lot of interesting stuff cross my desk and it gets me thinking sometimes. Now before I did the search, I didn't know it was already invented, but apparently the science already exits: http://www.theregister.co.uk/2003/10/31/israelis_ship_eight_teraops_optical/

Now what I'd be interested to see is if they think to use mutlicolor/frequency lasers and detectors to produce multiple values for a single "bit". In regular computing you can't do this so much because we just use the positive or negative charge of a bunch of flowing electrons to determine how things work. But we could instead use a multitude of broadspectrum beams, where each beam represents far more than just true and false.

Just the inherent speed boost of using optics is awesome enough, but having the additional option of moving away from binary logic really does open a lot of doors for even further speed improvement.

What alternative logic systems exist? Will optical technology allow computers to "think" more about the grey area between TRUE and FALSE, or will it simply bring more efficiant binary logic?
==Chris

Well it's certainly the chance to develop them, or simply allow for more efficient binary ones as you say. I suppose it all depends on the range the emitter and detector can handle. I'm not horribly technically adept in these areas but I imagine that there are a variety of ways to translate the frequency or color spectrum of the the beam to an arbitrary number which corresponds to a piece of either binary or new type of logic. I mean, wouldn't it be nice if your processor could process things as massively parrallel byte arrays instead of massively parrallel bit arrays?