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What is this picture of?

No peeking now : )

http://debreuil.com/glyphs/

posted on Thursday, August 26, 2004 8:45 AM

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# re: Ternary base
Julien Couvreur
Posted @ 8/26/2004 4:01 PM
Actually base 3 is quite interesting, because it is the optimal trade-off between number size (how many digits to express 10.000?) and alphabet size (1, 2, 3,... 10).

I've been thinking about the glyph problem as well, but more along the lines of how to pick the characters so that OCR becomes easier and more resistant to noise.

One constraint that you didn't spec is that in addition to left-to-right dis-ambiguity, there should also be no ambiguity between vertical and horizontal lines.
XOX
XOX
XOX
Are these three lines that say XOX or three columns that say either XXX or OOO?
In your case, bilo and bile seem to be the same at different angles... :(
# re: What is this picture of?
Burak KALAYCI
Posted @ 8/26/2004 6:01 PM
That's a great article Robin, a joy to read as always. Congrats.

I haven't finished it yet (it *is* long), but I'm inclined to stay with 0..F notation, because I'm used to it.

One note: Turkish has absolutely one sound per letter. For example George would be written as 'corc' (where letter C in Turkish has the sound of G or J in English). It's indeed very easy to spell - you spell as you hear it. Some words still need to be taught how to spell, but in general, in Turkish spelling is kind of transparent, you don't think of it at all when writing. We have 29 letters in our alphabet, but no X or Q. Ommission of Q makes 'spell as you write' a bit weird, but we are used to spell the Q sound with a K (and read it either as K or Q)...

Best regards,
Burak
# re: What is this picture of?
Robin Debreuil
Posted @ 8/26/2004 6:04 PM
Hey Julien,

Wow, excellent points (I wave my stinky pipe at you). I hadn't considered the problem of someone saying 'write down a number between 1 and 15'. If you write 4 (looks like a 'c'), and then they guess four, you could always say it was an 8 (looks like n). You really need to recognize numbers without a north pointing compass mark, exactly like you say. The magician's union wouldn't stand for it. Back to the drawing board.

OCR is also a great point, I'm think that is only a few more years that would be an issue though, but probably I'm wildly optimistic on this.

I'm not sure about base 3 though. It is mathematically efficient, but I'm not sure if that is the target audience to please (maybe it is?). There are things like the number of objects we can count by glancing, the number of symbols we are comfortable with in manipulations - eg. what humans are best at. We seem comfortable with a large number of symbols, but not so good at a large number of objects. I suspect the driving force of numbering systems is that we are so crappy at counting, maybe a higher base is natural for us. Not sure : ).

Awesome article btw, and great blog. Link hinting is a totally good idea, just as long as blog spammers can't value their own links : ). Though it would be more trouble, there would be nice sides to the link attributes sitting on a separate (publicly read only) file on the server. Well lots to read there, thanks : ).

PS I added your comments (and you as a contributor) - hope that is ok, but just let me know if you would rather I didn't..
# re: What is this picture of?
Robin Debreuil
Posted @ 8/26/2004 6:28 PM
Hey Burak,

I actually spend about 6 months trying to learn Turkish, and I must say it was/is the most logical language I've ever come across. I had heard it was 're-written' in the early 1900's, kind of consolidating dialects and ironing out irregularities - is that right? I heard the same was done with Indonesian, making it fairly easy to learn as well. Then again, everyone's an expert when on the road, I really not sure if any of that is true. Might have just been English people making excuses ; ).

Also I was suprized that as far as NW China they speak languages very similar to Turkish. In fact even Janpanese and Korean apparently are related.. They are a bit similar for sure, verb at the end, and verb suffixes can do almost anything. Even the sound, 'des' in Japanese and 'dir' in Turkish. It seems sometimes the history of the world is hidden in our accents. Maybe that is why we say 'uhhh' so much in Canada ; ).
# re: What is this picture of?
Robin Debreuil
Posted @ 8/26/2004 8:07 PM
Wow, that 'balanced ternary notation' concept, where the digits are -1, 0, 1 (from Julien's link) is really really neat. Leads to here:
http://perun.hscs.wmin.ac.uk/~jra/ternary/
and googles to more great info like this:
http://www.cs.toronto.edu/~hehner/ratno.pdf
and Mr Knuth himself:
http://www-cs-faculty.stanford.edu/~knuth/fasc3a.ps.gz

I thought I had scoured the net for this kind of thing, goes to show there no google like peoople.

Thanks again...
# re: What is this picture of?
yzz
Posted @ 8/27/2004 3:00 PM
Great article,
Interesting, inspiring and easy to follow.
Looking forward to see the rest of it. (When you fill empty sections)

Thank you.
# Number geeks!
More Whidbey stuff
Posted @ 9/3/2004 4:32 PM
# re: What is this picture of?
Bertrand Le Roy
Posted @ 9/3/2004 4:33 PM
Excellent and hilarious article! Linked to it from my blog. Keep on the madness!
# Number geeks!
More Whidbey stuff
Posted @ 9/3/2004 4:34 PM
# Random Intel
technostan
Posted @ 9/6/2004 10:57 PM
I finally have some time to catch up on some of the interesting clippings I've saved in Bloglines. Some of this stuff might be old news (i.e. a week old). Wikipedia I missed the whole Wikipedia debate last week but via Joi Ito, there's a summary to the various discussions. I personally use Wikipedia all the time and I think it's great for looking up knowledge. I've never had to questioned the authority of Wikipedia because like any other encyclopedia, I only use it for quick reference material. One thing I'd like to point out about Wikipedia is its place in the world of academia. Last year, I remember a girl in my history class losing some marks in an essay she wrote because she had used Wikipedia as an academic source. Asking for an explaination, the professor blasted the "academic authoritity" of Wikipedia. On some level, I'd have to side with the professor on this one. Although Wikipedia is an awesome starting point to find keywords to fuel additional queries, I don't think it's appropriate to use it in the actual content of an academic paper (yet). What I would love to see is a reputation system so people can gain recognition for their articles. After all, isn't this one of the components of the higher echelon of academics? I'm sure I'm not the first to think of this and sure enough, a Goggle search reveals this article on ways to improve the Wiki. Numbering System Robin Debreuil wrote...
# re: What is this picture of?
Bertrand Le Roy
Posted @ 9/7/2004 2:48 PM
Thanks for the comments. I answered on my own blog.

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