# binary max and binary min [closed]

I'm reading a paper about constraint satisfaction problem and found a term "binary Max and binary Min" operations but I dont know the meaning. If someone know could you please explain for me? I googled it but didn't find nothing.

## closed as unclear what you're asking by Evil, Yuval Filmus, Discrete lizard♦, Thomas Klimpel, vonbrandJul 11 '18 at 13:36

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• Perhaps you could link to the paper. – Yuval Filmus Jul 1 '18 at 22:25
• @YuvalFilmus the paper is unpuplished. beside the binary min and max is an other terminology, ternary minority$(x,y,z)=x\bigoplus y\bigoplus z$ where $\bigoplus$ refers to exclusive or and all $x$, $y$ and $z$ have zero or one values. – GhD Jul 1 '18 at 22:30
• Without context, one can only guess at the meaning. You're not helping us to help you. – Yuval Filmus Jul 1 '18 at 22:32
• @YuvalFilmus I understand. Anyway thank you for your comments. – GhD Jul 1 '18 at 22:33
• My guess is the min and max functions on two arguments. – Yuval Filmus Jul 2 '18 at 5:03

In theoretical computer science, in the context of operators or functions, "binary" usually means "taking two arguments", whereas "Boolean" means "taking one of two values", especially if those values are true and false or $0$ and $1$.
So, for example, the ordinary addition operator on the natural numbers is binary (it adds two things) but not Boolean (the arguments can take infinitely many different values). Conversely, the function $f(x,y,z)=(x\lor y)\land z$ is Boolean (its arguments are true/false) but not binary (it takes three arguments, not two; it's ternary).
"Binary" is also used to denote the base-$2$ number system but that doesn't seem relevant, here: min and max operate on numbers as abstract quantities, and the representation of those numbers (binary, decimal, Egyptian hieroglyphs, ...) is irrelevant.