A prisoner who worked out how to input Chinese characters into a machine
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Re: A prisoner who worked out how to input Chinese characters into a machine
#2Re: A prisoner who worked out how to input Chinese characters into a machine
#3What happened to Zhi afterwards? I felt like the article ended just as things were getting good.
Re: A prisoner who worked out how to input Chinese characters into a machine
#4He 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.
Re: A prisoner who worked out how to input Chinese characters into a machine
#5Looks 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.
Re: A prisoner who worked out how to input Chinese characters into a machine
#6What happened to Zhi afterwards? I felt like the article ended just as things were getting good.
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
Re: A prisoner who worked out how to input Chinese characters into a machine
#7This 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...
Re: A prisoner who worked out how to input Chinese characters into a machine
#8I 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.
Re: A prisoner who worked out how to input Chinese characters into a machine
#9What happened to Zhi afterwards? I felt like the article ended just as things were getting good.
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;-)
Re: A prisoner who worked out how to input Chinese characters into a machine
#10It 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.