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A prisoner who worked out how to input Chinese characters into a machine

wired.com

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Re: A prisoner who worked out how to input Chinese characters into a machine

#11

Post by gibolt »

est wrote: post #4

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-l…

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.

Re: A prisoner who worked out how to input Chinese characters into a machine

#12

Post by wizzwizz4 »

morninglight wrote: post #9
irrational wrote: post #3

What 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;-)

So why do you believe them?

Re: A prisoner who worked out how to input Chinese characters into a machine

#14

Post by xster »

gibolt wrote: post #11
est wrote: post #4

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-l…

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.

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.

Re: A prisoner who worked out how to input Chinese characters into a machine

#15

Post by dang »

mc32 wrote: post #7

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 a…

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....

Re: A prisoner who worked out how to input Chinese characters into a machine

#16

Post by seanmcdirmid »

est wrote: post #4

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-l…

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.

Re: A prisoner who worked out how to input Chinese characters into a machine

#18

Post by yorwba »

xster wrote: post #14
gibolt wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

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.

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 和 hé ㄏㄢˋ (which would correspond to pinyin hàn) and 崖 yá ㄧㄞˊ (which would correspond to pinyin yái).

Stuff like that occasionally trips me up when switching between pinyin and zhuyin.

Re: A prisoner who worked out how to input Chinese characters into a machine

#19

Post by mc32 »

dang wrote: post #15
mc32 wrote: post #7

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 a…

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 l…

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".

Re: A prisoner who worked out how to input Chinese characters into a machine

#20

Post by 6543ger23 »

dang wrote: post #15
mc32 wrote: post #7

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 a…

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 l…

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.

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