Earlier quoted context omitted.
> higher entropy How so? The entropy looks (dangerously) low to me.
High entropy = very low margin for error. "aaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaa" is low entropy, "JkjgpUBn74AREExy" is high.
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Dotsies (2012)
71–80 of 204 posts
Re: Dotsies (2012)
#72I feel compelled to write up a summary of the comments here and responses to each one: > This is useless. Who cares? It's super cool! > This is not well-suited for use case X. Did you read the page? It's so great that someone thought of this and did it. > This has been done before. SUPER. COOL. > It's hard to read. I don't know what you aren't getting about this. > What if it implemented improvement X? I don't know,…
I feel like HN should implement a "positive-only" or "constructive-only" flag for posts, whether set by posters or moderators. Perhaps all Show HN. Start to experiment, see what sticks.
I think generally we should strive for positive comments. But I have seen some pretty terrible Show HN’s. To be clear, they are the minority. But there are some that are basically “I will put drug dealing sex workers on the blockchain using Tor” or similar where I think it is warranted to point out that it’s a terrible idea or terrible execution or both.
Re: Dotsies (2012)
#73I think this is a funny and cool idea, but there's quite big flaw: it doesn't have a clear baseline. Without context, "ABBA" basically looks identical to "DEED".
Also, if you go so far to create a new alphabet, you could also make it phonetic. Rather than this one, I'd like to see a phonetic syllable alphabet (like the Korean one) for English.
Re: Dotsies (2012)
#74One advantage of regular letters compared to this is that it's pretty easy to tell that even a fairly mangled A is still an A; a word written in dotsies loses a lot of its legibility as soon as it's not displayed in fairly large pixels across a very clear background. Viewing things at an angle? While it moves by? On a dirty or wet piece of paper? Forget about it. It's a super fun idea, though. I would 100% put this i…
Not to mention recognizing individual letters. The difference between “a” and “b” in Latin alphabet is drastic. In dotsies you could only tell them apart if other letters near them give you relative height of the dots to some baseline.
Dotsies seem to make a tradeoff where they optimize for higher information density at the cost of much higher error rate (or requirement for precision and accuracy if you will). I also definitely see your point about font sizes. Basically it’s a valiant attempt at a reimagined alphabet but I don’t think it actually achieves higher info density in the real world.
Re: Dotsies (2012)
#75Very interesting. It's definitely more compact but I would challenge the more readable claim. If you think about how the human vision system is constructed (similar to convnets in deep learning), the brain uses a hierarchy of constructs like circles, lines, corners, etc. Recognizing letters requires the triggering of multiple layers of these constructs. A dot, and another dot 1 pixel higher or lower is easy to get co…
> I'm not an expert on the vision system but I would think, sticking to at most 2 different locations instead of 5, and mixing in vertical lines, horizontal lines, diagonals, corners, and circles might be work exploring.
What you proposed here turns out very similar to the elements of Korean Characters.
As an East Asian who is native to Chinese Characters, two-dimensional symbols are always more appealing to me. I started to learn English 25 years ago while Japanese 10, but I read Japanese much more faster than English even without any Kanji.
Re: Dotsies (2012)
#76just use Chinese, it’s optimized for screen space (each character occupies a square, and has complex meaning of a word, and people read their shapes, rather than stroke by stroke )
>just use Chinese, it’s optimized for screen space ...
[cite needed][original research?]
Re: Dotsies (2012)
#77Earlier quoted context omitted.
> higher entropy How so? The entropy looks (dangerously) low to me.
High entropy = very low margin for error. "aaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaa" is low entropy, "JkjgpUBn74AREExy" is high.
Well I guess I am more used to the physicist’s definition of entropy, which can be described as “the higher the entropy, the less we care about the details.”
Re: Dotsies (2012)
#78I think this is a funny and cool idea, but there's quite big flaw: it doesn't have a clear baseline. Without context, "ABBA" basically looks identical to "DEED". Also, if you go so far to create a new alphabet, you could also make it phonetic. Rather than this one, I'd like to see a phonetic syllable alphabet (like the Korean one) for English.
I was thinking the same thing re: phonetic. Dotsies opening paragraph claims the latin alphabet was optimized for writing, but it wasn't, it was optimized for phonetics (if anything at all), which is useful to both reading and writing. However, we know from Korean and Japanese Katakana/Hiragana that phonetics can be generalized into syllables and don't have to be spelled out as in English/Latin. A Dotsies version of that would be ideal.
Re: Dotsies (2012)
#79I once managed to install the Dotsies font to a rooted Android... it was fun for about 10 minutes! I agree with the other comments that a font more focused on overall word shape would probably be easier to read at high speed.
Re: Dotsies (2012)
#80Earlier quoted context omitted.
High entropy = very low margin for error. "aaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaa" is low entropy, "JkjgpUBn74AREExy" is high.
Well I guess I am more used to the physicist’s definition of entropy, which can be described as “the higher the entropy, the less we care about the details.”
Very possibly, but, as far as I know, in the information-theoretic sense (which is what we mean when we talk about alphabets and conflating one letter for another) it's "high entropy" = "low redundancy".