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Human and Machine Readable Handwritten Language?
darrint writes "In some obscure corner of the Earth, has someone developed a human handwritten language which can be easily read by a machine? Why is the visual divide between what can be written by a human and what can be read by a machine so wide? At one extreme is the bar code, which I certainly cannot hand write. Machines can read it easily. Bank checks have a human readable account and routing numbers printed in special ink running along their bottom margins. These numbers can be read by a machine and are clearly legible to a human, but I doubt I could write them for input to a machine. My old Palm handheld could read something like handwriting in its little box. OCR exists but I've never thought of it as reliable. I would like to dash off little notes on stickies or in a tiny spiral notebook and be able to suck them into vim, a browser text-input box, and so forth. Perhaps I'd have to learn some kind of machine readable 'shorthand.' Has it been done?"
I don't think that a lot of effort has been made to develop a different language for people to communicate with machines. I think most of research time in that area is spent in improving handwriting recognition, ie changing what machines do rather than changing what we do.
I've always pictured the color of OS zealotry as a sort of bright flamingo pinkish hue
They're good, but they're not that good. Try writing in someone's name on them. Most of them work by guessing what you wrote based on a dictionary (similar to cellphone texting). Give it anything it can't look up and it'll be close, but more often than not, not quite.
An alphabet based on entirely straight lines would be easy enough for a computer to read if letters never touched. The software would first detect the line of text, then along the row of letters, find the first black pixel, then find all the lines touching the line containing that pixel. Bonus points if all characters had a single vertical line (making this sort of a barcode of its own).
Sure, it's called... THE ALPHABET.
Learn to write it neatly and the computer will have no problem reading it. Or humans either, for that matter. Write it poorly and both will have a hard time.
"If you make people think they're thinking, they'll love you; But if you really make them think, they'll hate you." - DM
They don't read from paper. They can get extra info:
* pressure
* speed
* stroke order
* stroke direction
* pen-up and pen-down events
* timing
Most of the responses seem to be missing the point of the post.
Okay. I'm attacking the point of the post.
There's no reason to reinvent the alphabet any more than there is reinvent the wheel.
If we change the alphabet so machines can read it, other people stop being able to read it. It's the wrong solution for the problem.
If my handwriting is good enough that I can read it two weeks later, and my peers and friends and family can read it perfectly (i've been told I have particularly good handwriting) then why should I have to change it so that my PC can understand it, but nobody else can?
I could memorize a second alphabet, having one for me and one for my PC... but why?
If I could tell the software "This is how I write a 'k' and this is how I write an 'R'", that would improve things a lot IMO. My 'k' might look like someone else's 'R'; but my 'k' and 'R' look absolutely nothing alike. My ampersand kind of looks like a plus sign; but it's totally distinguishable from my plus sign. If I could dawn this on the software...
"Main issue to remember is that computers process in numbers, not letters, to completely solve this issue, we'd need a language that's completely based on numbers"
I don't know how you've reached that conclusion, there's actually not that much difference between numbers and letters to a computer - both have binary values. The only reason a computer might be able to recognise digits 0-9 easier than also including A-Z, is that there are less glyphs to recognise in the alphabet. All you'd by doing by writing down numbers instead of letters is changing the set of patterns it's trying to recognise.
Numbers would also be easier to recognise than say, joined hand writing, as it's obvious what's part of each digit, with joined it's harder to tell if a line is part of the first character, the second, or if it's just part of the link between the two.
So, block capitals?
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The reason for the difficulty with regard to handwriting is the following: Humans can usually read much faster than they can write. Therefore, to mitigate that fact, handwriting is usually optimized for speedy writing than readability. It is assumed that making it harder to read isn't much of a problem since humans can already read fast so a bit of a slowdown due to a somewhat fuzzy handwriting isn't much of a problem. On the other hand, writing neatly takes a lot of time but makes reading easier.
So handwriting is optimized towards fast writing instead of easy reading, hence the difficulty for a computer to decipher it. Using a handwriting style that is easier to read will most likely result in slower writing speed, which is not a design goal for a handwriting style.
Processors can function with other than 0 and 1, think vector processors.
If multithreaded vector processing sounds strange, maybe you're more familiar with the fuzzy logic buzzword.
Yes, I'm oversimplifying things, but I don't have readymade solution here, I'm just trying to explain concept.
"there are less glyphs to recognise" - You got my point, it's far more accurate to recognize 10 different symbols than it is to recognize 34, or more when we have accents. If we have language that's based on 10 symbols only, we could represent those with numbers from 0 to 9. And most teenagers today are used to input information with 0 to 9 already, think SMS.
Personally, I'm still waiting for accurate speech control.
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You got my point, it's far more accurate to recognize 10 different symbols than it is to recognize 34, or more when we have accents.
Not necessarily. Trying to write a phonologically complex language like English is bad enough when the number of symbols is half the number of sounds, as currently; if the number were 1/5th, as you suggest, then words would have to be much longer, and reading would become more difficult for humans.
English already has to use more than one letter to represent many sounds: "ch", "sh", "th". With only 10 letters, it would be necessary to have a lot more combinations like that. This is not simplicity.
And most teenagers today are used to input information with 0 to 9 already, think SMS.
When I type a text message on my phone, I type "how are you", not "4466691277733199966688".
The input method is irrelevant; the question is how the data is represented. And it's represented with letters, not numbers.
Personally, I'm still waiting for accurate speech control.
That's only possible with perfect AI. I expect you'll be waiting for the rest of your life...