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Boustrophedon

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Re: Boustrophedon

#41
post #37
post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>So there could be some cognitive benefit This is only really the case for phonetic writing where you learn to recognise the shape of groups of letters (this is how you are reading this text). For logographic/pictographic writing it is much less of a benefit. And as I wrote above, even for alphabetic writing like Greek it doesn't really matter if all you read is the occasional monumental inscription.

I assume you meant to write "alphabetic" rather than "phonetic" since many languages that use alphabets use them in a way only loosely tied to sound (which you allude to by talking about reading in chunks of grapheme clusters). Korean is a notable exception but I'd bet most readers don't parse the sound either.

No I really mean phonetic. Any system where you combine graphemes more or less freely to form words will be parsed groupwise. Though much less so for Greek monumental majuscle writing than modern books.

Take Japanese writing for example, you definitely don't parse individual kana. Same with hangul, as you mention.

Even for Chinese writing it is true but to a very small extent, but my point was that it is much more important for phonetic writing, and most important indeed for alphabetic. I have even heard that it is less pronounced in Cyrillic, because all letters basically look like majuscles so the outline of words is quite uniform.

I don't quite get the comment about alphabetic script not being very phonetic, it's true that this would promote parsing words as units, but the main reason we do it is because it's much faster, not because some spellings are opaque. Kana spelling is almost completely one-to-one but it still makes sense to read e.g. -ma.shi.ta as a unit.

Re: Boustrophedon

#42
post #32
post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A sibling comment suggests that it's to help encode the direction, but I wonder if there's a less intentional reason, which is: why not mirror the letters? If I were coming up with conventions for reading and writing for the first time or possibly based on descriptions that some sailor had reported, it's not obvious to me that the direction of the letter should matter, especially if the letters you are using aren't m…

Exactly. And I think the idea to encode direction is a bit anachronistic, in those days they didn't even use punctuation or spaces so it was pretty hard to read anyway, you'd have to do a lot of thinking. And of course with Semitic writing you didn't even encode the vowel sounds. In hieroglyphic inscriptions the animals etc do face the direction of reading (which varies), but I'm not sure this was in order to help pe…

I was told in my university class that the glyphs faced the direction of reading because they were thought of as talking to the reader. And, of course, it's rude to talk to someone when you're facing away from them.

Re: Boustrophedon

#43
The Floyd Steinberg error diffusion dithering algorithm can use a boustrophedonous scan order to eliminate the diagonal geometric artifacts you get by scanning each row the same direction.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Floyd%E2%80%93Steinberg_dither...

"In some implementations, the horizontal direction of scan alternates between lines; this is called "serpentine scanning" or boustrophedon transform dithering."

I implemented some eight bit cellular automata heat diffusion rules with error diffusion, which accumulated an unfortunate drift up and to the right because of the scan order.

Rudy Rucker pointed out the problem:

http://donhopkins.com/mediawiki/index.php/CAM6_Simulator

"Rudy Rucker: I feel like you might have some kind of bug in your update code, an off-by-one thing or a problem with the buffer flipping. My reason is that I see persistent upward drift in the action, like if I mouse drag a blob it generally moves up. Also the patterns appearing in the blob aren't uniform. I mean...this IS supposed to be the 2D Rug rule, isn't it?"

So instead of scanning back and forth boustrophedoniously (which wouldn't eliminate the vertical drift, just the horizontal drift), I rotated the direction of scanning 90 degrees each frame ("spinning scan") to spread the drift out evenly in all directions over time.

https://github.com/SimHacker/CAM6/blob/master/javascript/CAM...

    // Rotate the direction of scanning 90 degrees every step,
    // to cancel out the dithering artifacts that would cause the
    // heat to drift up and to the right.
That totally canceled out the unwanted drifting and geometric dithering artifacts! That made it possible to cultivate much more subtle (or not-so-subtle) effects, like dynamically switching per-cell between different anisotropic convolution kernels (see the "Twistier Marble" rule for an extreme example).

http://donhopkins.com/home/CAM6

Re: Boustrophedon

#44
Scott Kim has a wonderful talent at designing "ambigrams". Check out his classic book "Inversions" and his gallery of more recent work!

http://www.scottkim.com.previewc40.carrierzone.com/inversion...

An inversion is a word or name written so it reads in more than one way. For instance, the word Inversions above is my name upside down. Douglas Hofstadter coined ambigram as the generic word for inversions. I drew my first inversion in 1975 in an art class, wrote a book called Inversions in 1981, and am now doing animated inversions.

Re: Boustrophedon

#45
that could have been useful to read text on a glass wall from both sides... too bad that they had not invented it yet.

Re: Boustrophedon

#47
See also: the Boustrophedon cellular decomposition for robotic 2D coverage path planning, e.g. for mowing, painting, vacuuming, etc. The method works by decomposing an arbitrary environment into a union of smaller, simplified shapes that are easy to cover with a boustrophedon motion - moving back and forth like an ox plowing.

http://planning.cs.uiuc.edu/node352.html

Re: Boustrophedon

#48
Older NVIDIA GPUs (and maybe current ones) used an alternating-direction scheme for coarse rasterization which was called (somewhat tongue in cheek) boustrophedonic rasterization. The idea was to have more spatial locality for the coverage samples issued by the rasterizer compared to a conventional same-direction scheme. Spatial locality in the two-dimensional sense correlates to spatial locality in the texture cache, for example.

Re: Boustrophedon

#50
My son would write like this when he was first learning to write. I was constantly having to prompt him to carriage return, and write the letters the correct way round.
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