The Prisoner Who Revolutionized Language With a Teacup Book Excerpt - China HEAD TOPICS

The Prisoner Who Revolutionized Language With a Teacup

10/21/2022 8:29:00 PM

Book excerpt Zhi Bingyi stared at the eight characters on the wall and wondered how could one render Chinese in a language that computers can read

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WIRED

Book excerpt Zhi Bingyi stared at the eight characters on the wall and wondered how could one render Chinese in a language that computers can read While imprisoned for being a “reactionary,” physicist and engineer Zhi Bingyi began devising a system to help computing machines read Chinese characters. Scott GilbertsonBut it never would have occurred to any of them to come up with a solution for a machine. Every solution of theirs had been oriented toward the human user—how to organize characters so they are easier for people to write and to learn, less taxing and time-consuming to memorize or look up. The question in Zhi’s mind burned to a different purpose: How could one render Chinese in a language that computers can read—in the zeros and ones of binary code? Having been used to building computer models of his electrical devices, he would have come across the problem many times. Read more:
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In this soup, broccoli stems cook with the potatoes and are pureed to form a creamy base, while broccoli florets add texture to the finished dish. Read more >> Enrollment in Korean classes has shot up. Thank K-popInterest in Korean popular culture has skyrocketed in the past decade, thanks to the music of BTS and the South Korean film Parasite. Now, the number of college students studying Korean has risen 78%. We need less weird teens into manga As a third gen Korean American, I grew up in a predominantly Caucasian suburb outside of L.A. I knew nothing about my culture and was often indifferent towards it. Enter BTS. These 7 men have given me a crash course on Korean-ness and a love for my culture. Never before 1/ How about the book Pachinko? Enrollment in Korean classes has shot up. Thank K-popCollege student enrollment in language classes has plateaued in recent years, but enrollment in Korean language classes rose 78% from 2009 to 2016, thanks to interest in BTS, Squid Game and other Korean pop culture: Slavery Through Prison Labor Is on the Ballot for Voters in 5 US StatesNearly 20 states have constitutions that include language permitting slavery and involuntary servitude as criminal punishments. Masks Up! This is not slavery. They are imprisoned for a reason. How about we just sit them in a cell no TV or anything while they serve their sentence ? Can psychedelics cure? Science is on the verge of finding outA neuroscientist says these substances have the potential to 'revolutionize' mental health treatment, although many unknowns remain. No Yes. Maybe. A’s catcher Sean Murphy named Gold Glove finalistMurphy is joined in the AL catchers’ race by Cal Raleigh of the division rival Seattle Mariners and Jose Trevino of the Yankees. How groundbreaking tech could revolutionize heart transplants in HoustonThe machine essentially brings the heart back to life by mimicking the body’s natural... Power Up Anywhere With Our Favorite Portable Chargers Scott Gilbertson But it never would have occurred to any of them to come up with a solution for a machine.BTS announces upcoming Korean military service East Asian Studies departments have struggled to accommodate the increasing demand for Korean classes, which historically have been limited and underresourced, experts say.Subscribe to our weekday newsletter Add WBUR to your morning routine The email address entered is invalid It's Boston local news in one concise, fun and informative email Thank you! You have been subscribed to WBUR Today.Texas Secretary of State to Send Inspectors to Observe Vote Counting in Harris County Sen. Every solution of theirs had been oriented toward the human user—how to organize characters so they are easier for people to write and to learn, less taxing and time-consuming to memorize or look up. The question in Zhi’s mind burned to a different purpose: How could one render Chinese in a language that computers can read—in the zeros and ones of binary code? Having been used to building computer models of his electrical devices, he would have come across the problem many times. Loading. To bridge to the state of technology in the advanced world in the 1970s, China had begun to build machines that could handle mass-scale calculations, sieve through huge amounts of information, and coordinate complex operations. The data for calculating and controlling flight paths, military targets, and geographical positioning, or tracking agricultural and industrial output, had to be collected first.. Yet all the existing records, documents, and reports were in Chinese. Akbari first proposed changes in 2019; the GOP-dominant General Assembly then had to pass the changes by a majority vote in one two-year legislative period and then pass it again with at least two-thirds approval in the next. It became clear that in order to be part of the computing age at all, the Chinese script would have to be rendered digitally. Now half or more of Korean language students are made up of non-Korean students who discovered the Korean language through K-pop, he said. Western computing technology was also moving in the direction of text processing and communication, not just running large-scale calculations. Converting human language scripts into digital form was the next frontier. Michelle Cho also noted the shift from heritage speakers to non-Korean speakers, with non-Korean students now making up about 80% of her Korean cinema and media classes at the University of Toronto. The arms race during the Cold War was advancing the state of computing technology in both the Soviet Union and the United States. Getting Chinese inside the machine was critical to ensuring that China was not left out. Loading.” “We understand that those who are incarcerated cannot be forced to work without pay, but we should not create a situation where they won’t be able to work at all,” Akbari said. Requiring precise inputs, computing machines are unforgiving of inconsistencies and exceptions. All the characteristics of Chinese that stymied earlier innovators—the unwieldy size of its character inventory; its complex strokes, tones, and homophones; the difficulty of segmentation—created new challenges in the digitization of the script.. Executable commands could only be in the form of a yes or a no, an on-or-off switch of an electric current running through the circuitry of a computer control board. No partial solutions or patches would help China get by, this time. During Zhi’s incarceration, China was in the throes of its biggest social and political upheaval yet and hardly had the resources to make such a bid for the future. Those targeted would end up in custody for minor actions, effectively enslaving them again. But for a country so far behind the Western world, science and technology were not just a barrier. They were viewed as essential for helping China leapfrog out of backwardness and speed up the process of modernization. The challenge was multifaceted: to devise a code for Chinese that is easy for humans to remember and use and that can be entered into a machine via punched tape or keyboard; to find a way for the machine to store the massive amount of information required to identify and reproduce Chinese characters; and to be able to retrieve and restore the script with pinpoint precision, on paper or on a screen. Zhi knew he could tackle the first, critical step: how best to input Chinese into the machine. That meant figuring out a way to represent each character in a language that the human operator and the machine could both understand: as a finite set of zeros and ones entered directly into the machine, or in the alphabetic letters on which computer programming languages were already built. Its proposed change would replace the current exception clause with language saying"slavery and involuntary servitude are forever prohibited in this State. The latter seemed more promising. Mapping characters onto the alphabet immediately led to other questions, however: How many alphabet letters would it take to uniquely encode a single character? Should the spelling of characters be abbreviated like acronyms? And what should serve as the basis of the acronyms— characters, components, or strokes? Most Popular .