One side effect of operating in flow space is that barcodes are not limited to binary sequences. For example, each flow can correspond to 0, 1, or 2 bases in a ternary encoding scheme. This scheme allows for a greater number of codewords occupying the same number of flows. However, a flowspace representation must correspond to a legitimate sequence that yields these flow-space values. For example, we cannot have a flow of T, C, T with values 1, 0, 1. For a flow of T, C, T, both T bases are consumed in the first flow, and the sequencing reaction yields the incorrect values 2, 0, ?.