[HN Gopher] A prisoner who worked out how to input Chinese chara...
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A prisoner who worked out how to input Chinese characters into a
machine
Author : dangerman
Score : 113 points
Date : 2022-01-26 15:13 UTC (7 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (www.wired.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.wired.com)
| karmakaze wrote:
| It seems like the Hangul[0]/Korean writing system was retrofitted
| into Chinese with the challenge being to make the imprecise
| precise. Hangul was designed with the purpose of solving
| illiteracy and so the character forms were built simply from
| sound components. Doing it in reverse with a larger unstructured
| set of symbols is quite the feat.
|
| [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hangul
| pseingatl wrote:
| Korean is not a tonal language. But Hangul is great, I wish
| Thailand would adopt it.
| monocasa wrote:
| The same idea works tonemes distinguished by common graphical
| features as well.
| karmakaze wrote:
| Thai spoken language is the opposite extreme of German,
| vowels are the salient parts and consonants are often barely
| present and highly interchangeable. I don't know how the Thai
| written language works or how complex it is in comparison but
| I imagine it also wouldn't be a straightforward mapping.
| Quick lookup says it's tonal and analytic [idk what this is]
| like Chinese and Vietnamese.
| VygmraMGVl wrote:
| When Hangul was invented, Korean was tonal and Hangul
| accounted for this with diacritics.
|
| Apparently some dialects of Korean are still tonal.
|
| https://autolingual.com/korean-tones/
| jjcc wrote:
| Here's the bio of the prisoner:
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zhi_Bingyi
| rabbits77 wrote:
| I was wondering how he ended up and the biography on Wikipedia
| is unclear on how his life may have improved after publishing
| his results. He published in 1978 and passed away fifteen years
| later. Other than a note that he joined The Party in 1991 there
| is no information on his last years.
|
| I am not sure what to make of the information that is given.
| Does it imply he was treated poorly, even tortured, until 1991
| when he relented?
| neonate wrote:
| https://archive.is/Cl2eK
| kabell wrote:
| > Because the code took only the first letter, rather than the
| complete sound of the character, most regional speech variations
| did not matter.
|
| This bit is really interesting. This is one of the motivations
| for an open source Chinese IME framework called RIME:
| https://rime.im There are configurations available for a number
| of dialects like Suzhou or Shanghai dialects so that users who
| prefer those languages don't have to use Mandarin/putonghua
| pinyin.
| maupin wrote:
| The article doesn't go into the implementation of his system,
| which was likely a real bitch.
| est wrote:
| He is just one of the early pioneers of Chinese input methods,
| his particular method is stroke-based and works on 0-9 number
| pads, went obsolete decades ago, but surely had an influence over
| later popular ones like Wubi.
|
| Today, input methods were dominated by pronunciation based one
| like Pinyin. The heuristics based "smart" Pinyin input methods
| was actually invented by a non-tech folk and eventually hired by
| a then-large Internet company called Sogou, it was quite novel
| for the input method to suggest word pairs like a search engine
| with most frequent used ones readily type-able. Some later
| versions even include crazy macros like the current timestamp,
| emojis, or even read your contact list (!!) for quicker name &
| address suggestions.
| gibolt wrote:
| Pinyin may dominate in Mainland China, but places like Taiwan
| and Hong Kong still prefer their own input methods.
|
| Both generally use Traditional instead of Simplified characters
| and HK's Cantonese has an underused pinyin equivalent, but that
| isn't a cause. Other systems became prevalent first, and stuck.
| xster wrote:
| Taiwan's Zhuyin is 90+% the same as Pinyin except the input
| is composed with Chinese script radicals (like hiragana)
| rather than Latin script.
|
| > Both generally use Traditional instead of Simplified
|
| That doesn't impact the human side of the IME. It's just
| different output for the same input. And the input (Mandarin
| pronunciation) is the same for mainland and Taiwan.
| yorwba wrote:
| There are differences in the Mandarin pronunciations
| standardized on the Mainland and Taiwan. Most of them
| involve using the fifth tone or not, but there are a few
| more noticeable exceptions, like He _he_ HAN\ (which would
| correspond to pinyin _han_ ) and Ya _ya_ IAI/ (which would
| correspond to pinyin _yai_ ).
|
| Stuff like that occasionally trips me up when switching
| between pinyin and zhuyin.
| hangonhn wrote:
| The problem with pinyin is that it's phonetic based and it's
| based on Mandarin. For large sub-populations of Chinese
| speakers who primarily use other dialects, it's not as
| intuitive -- although this is changing overtime as Mandarin
| becomes more dominant across China. A stroke/character based
| system preserves a key characteristic of Chinese, which is that
| speakers of different Chinese dialects can all use the same
| writing system. However, I think Pinyin is easier for Mandarin
| speakers (in PRC at least) and also non-native Chinese speakers
| who likely come from a phonetic based writing system and have
| learned Mandarin using Pinyin.
| odiroot wrote:
| Pinyin is really peculiar. It makes it so much easier to learn
| to outsiders.
|
| I know some overseas Chinese people who (not being raised in
| China) never learned pinyin and prefer the stroke method. Some
| of the even prefer drawing the strokes by hand (instead of
| choosing from the keyboard).
|
| Any Chinese word, I've ever learned, I can only input using
| pinyin. The stroke method adds so much more mental overhead.
| thaumasiotes wrote:
| > I know some overseas Chinese people who (not being raised
| in China) never learned pinyin and prefer the stroke method.
|
| I knew someone who used wubi in preference to pinyin input.
| She grew up in Guangzhou until age 16, so it wasn't an issue
| of not learning pinyin. The problem, for her, was that she
| had no way to know the correct pinyin for a character, since
| she didn't distinguish between a bunch of sounds that are
| distinct in pinyin.
|
| > Any Chinese word, I've ever learned, I can only input using
| pinyin. The stroke method adds so much more mental overhead.
|
| If you were capable of writing by hand, this wouldn't be
| true.
| GauntletWizard wrote:
| Contact list has become the standard - You've probably not even
| noticed it, but Android's "Gboard" has contacts permissions,
| and will use your contact's names and nicknames as well as
| e-mail addresses as suggestions.
| MiddleEndian wrote:
| I noticed this (albeit with a different keyboard app) as soon
| as I switched from Windows Phone to Android. Couldn't stand
| it really, it would auto-suggest random email addresses and
| even numbers when I was just trying to type words.
|
| The least-bad Android keyboard I've ever used is the HTC
| keyboard, since it had a setting to only learn words I
| explicitly told it to remember.
| mkehrt wrote:
| I don't think reading your contact list is that weird. iOS
| autocorrect in English clearly does it.
| seanmcdirmid wrote:
| Pinyin is popular in the PRC, but not in Taiwan or HK. Taiwan
| input is dominated by Bopomofo, which is also pronunciation
| based. Mainland China is the largest country that uses Chinese
| input methods, however.
|
| I still remember entering Chinese using a pinyin T9 method on
| my Nokia handset in 2002. Pinyin on a 0-9 number pad, fun
| times.
| nojs wrote:
| As a non-chinese pinyin input is so much easier. One of the
| cool things about it is you can type a whole sentence just
| using the first letter of each character. Eg "wxzdnwsmbq" on my
| phone is sufficient to produce "Wo Xiang Zhi Dao Ni Wei Shi Yao
| Bu Qu ". In English I'd have to type the whole sentence "I want
| to know why you didn't go".
| mc32 wrote:
| This wasn't just some random prisoner.
|
| This was a highly educated pioneer who studied in the West and
| was recruited in the West but chose to go help his country and
| was initially rewarded with a very prestigious and secure job and
| also deserved --to then get caught up in the hong weibing purges.
| This is the lesson of ideology -it goes astray fast. Lukily for
| him, he didn't end up beaten to a pulp and dead in a semi
| anonymous lynching[1] in a no-name square.
|
| [1]https://www.theguardian.com/world/2016/may/07/mao-little-
| gen...
| dang wrote:
| Please don't take HN threads on generic ideological tangents.
| All that does is replace an interesting, specific, fresh topic
| with a shallow, predictable and boring one.
|
| I don't mean that it isn't exciting, but something can be both
| exciting, in the sense that it excites strong feelings, and
| boring, in the sense that it doesn't contain any new
| information. Rhetoric like "beaten to a pulp and dead in a semi
| anonymous lynching in a no-name square" is an excellent example
| of what I mean: it's highly exciting and at the same time not
| intellectually interesting.
|
| The larger generic topics are like black holes that suck in
| inquisitive spaceships (us!) that happen to veer nearby (https:
| //hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...). It
| takes a certain awareness to remember this, so that we can
| stick to more interesting conversation. Certainly the discovery
| of how to mechanize the processing of Chinese characters is
| much more interesting than "the lesson of ideology"--at least
| in HN's sense of the word "interesting".
|
| That's why we have this rule in the site guidelines. If you'd
| please review them, we'd appreciate it:
| https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html.
|
| Past explanations: https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0
| &prefix=true&sor....
| mc32 wrote:
| I understand, but I will respectfully disagree. These events
| occurred during the Cultural Revolution and the article
| prefaces it with such. It's inextricable. It is true he was
| an innovator, no doubt, but for the politics at the time,
| many other minds would have been able to contribute to the
| progress of the country but were not "as lucky".
| dang wrote:
| Ok, I can see the argument that I read it too generically
| and am happy to retreat this time. Thanks for the kind
| reply!
| jrochkind1 wrote:
| Agree with other dissenters here that this was not a "generic
| ideological tangent", it was specific and relevant to the OP.
| And i found it interesting.
|
| I also understand it's difficult to keep a comment on
| politics, even when it's not a "generic ideological tangent",
| from prompting a mess, and respect your inteventions to avoid
| the messes.
|
| But this was not a generic tangent.
| dang wrote:
| Ok, you guys, I'll take the point and back off on this one.
| Thanks for the feedback!
| jrochkind1 wrote:
| Now watch it turn into a political flamewar and prove you
| right haha. I mean, you do generally know what you're
| doing. It was just the template "generic ideological
| tangent" that got me going, it wasn't at all generic or a
| tangent... it still might result in a mess though! We'll
| see!
| 6543ger23 wrote:
| mc32's comment was informational and worth reading and the
| reference to the cultural revolution was IMHO very relevant
| because the guy lactually ived through it when he might very
| well not have. It comes across as a statement of fact to me,
| not at all a generic ideological tangent.
|
| The cultural revolution is a mystery to me just as much as
| anything else on HN, perhaps more so because it was about
| people, which are more complex and interesting than tech. The
| link to the article was useful.
| hbarka wrote:
| This man's biography would make an epic movie. From China, how
| did he manage to attend and graduate from Leipzig University in
| Germany during the height of WW2?
| irrational wrote:
| What happened to Zhi afterwards? I felt like the article ended
| just as things were getting good.
| jhbadger wrote:
| He was elected a member of the Chinese Academy of Sciences in
| 1980 (two years after publishing his paper about the input
| method) but he was already almost 70 years old, so he didn't
| have much of a career afterwards. He died in 1993
| morninglight wrote:
| He left China and went to Japan where he founded "Just Systems"
| in 1979. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/JustSystems
|
| Shortly afterwards, Just began selling the Japanese word
| processor, Ichitaro.
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ichitaro_(word_processor)
|
| Of course, not everyone agrees with these details;-)
| wizzwizz4 wrote:
| So why do you believe them?
| btbuildem wrote:
| I guess I get why he persisted while imprisoned -- anything to do
| to keep the mind busy. But why would he continue to work
| afterwards, and benefit the regime that betrayed him? I'd want to
| watch it burn and then sink, be left as far behind as possible,
| not enable them to keep up with technological advancements.
| bllguo wrote:
| is Mandarin the govt's language or his and the people's
| language? "benefiting the regime" was a mere side effect of his
| work (in fact the Maoists that persecuted him crumbled in the
| 70s, so ultimately they did not benefit at all! karmic)
|
| or maybe he just had an intellectual interest in the problem
| and wanted to solve it no matter what. who knows, but the world
| is better off for it
| spicybright wrote:
| This is an interesting question that shouldn't be down voted
| like it's being.
|
| From how the article is written (although admittedly I only
| skimmed it), it seems imprisonment didn't have a huge effect on
| his motivation to solve the problem.
|
| While I can't say I'd be as chipper after being jailed for a
| year, I can certainly understand the allure of attacking a hard
| problem with tenacity.
|
| He may have also separated the party from the people he
| interacted with everyday. In fact, I'd imagine being imprisoned
| built a lot of comradory with his fellow inmates.
|
| (Would love for someone else more knowledgeable to chime in, I
| just wanted to start the conversation)
| anonymousiam wrote:
| This is a good story for the modern age. Not so much because of
| the technical achievements of the protagonist, but more as a
| warning for the perpetrators/victims of class warfare in the
| world today.
|
| My father-in-law (now deceased) was similarly branded and nearly
| died while spending several years in a labor camp. He was
| forbidden to work upon his release, and banished to the
| countryside along with his family. Decades later, he received a
| formal apology from the CCP, but no compensation.
| jiehong wrote:
| Looks like this happened 2 years after Cangjie was invented in
| 1976 according to Wikipedia [0]. Although not in mainland China.
|
| Cangjie is at least still used a little bit.
|
| [0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cangjie_input_method
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