4 ms·

Why not use the Chinese characters (Kanji) to encode the moves in Chinese/Japanese semantics, instead of Base65536 ? It might not be as compact, but it would st

by vorg 11y ago

Why not use the Chinese characters (Kanji) to encode the moves in Chinese/Japanese semantics, instead of Base65536 ? It might not be as compact, but it would still be far more compact than Ascii AND you'd be able to read it without decoding software if you learn how to read a little Chinese or Japanese.

thaumasiotes 11y ago
It is significantly easier to write a format decoder than to learn to read, much less write, Chinese or Japanese. Also, on a pedantic note, kanji are Japanese characters. Chinese characters are hanzi. For most characters, they're the same, but there are a few differences.
- vorg 11y ago
  Fair point. As for the pedantic note, kanji is an English word whereas hanzi isn't, so that's why I used it.
  - thaumasiotes 11y ago
    eh... I think most people who recognize the word "kanji" at all are pretty well aware that it's a foreign word, and are likely to think of it that way. I do have a dictionary with an entry for "kanji", but that dictionary includes plenty of other foreign words too, like "haole" [Hawaiian term for non-Hawaiians, particularly (often pejorative) white people] (it doesn't have "hanzi", but it does have an entry for Han). I also have dictionaries that don't have an entry for "kanji".
comex 11y ago
Because you couldn't find a meaningful way to assign Chinese characters to represent each possible combination of two of {left, right, down, rotate}, which is what the previous hex encoding mentioned can do, let alone do better. (As a novice, I can think of relatively reasonable ways to represent some of them, but no way to account for order. For example, "down left" could be "southwest" via the Zodiac animal, "left right" could be "horizontal", and "down rotate" could be "screw"... but that wouldn't help with "left down", "right left", etc.)

4 ms·

Why not use the Chinese characters (Kanji) to encode the moves in Chinese/Japanese semantics, instead of Base65536 ? It might not be as compact, but it would st

by vorg 11y ago

thaumasiotes 11y ago
It is significantly easier to write a format decoder than to learn to read, much less write, Chinese or Japanese. Also, on a pedantic note, kanji are Japanese characters. Chinese characters are hanzi. For most characters, they're the same, but there are a few differences.
- vorg 11y ago
  Fair point. As for the pedantic note, kanji is an English word whereas hanzi isn't, so that's why I used it.
  - thaumasiotes 11y ago
    eh... I think most people who recognize the word "kanji" at all are pretty well aware that it's a foreign word, and are likely to think of it that way. I do have a dictionary with an entry for "kanji", but that dictionary includes plenty of other foreign words too, like "haole" [Hawaiian term for non-Hawaiians, particularly (often pejorative) white people] (it doesn't have "hanzi", but it does have an entry for Han). I also have dictionaries that don't have an entry for "kanji".
comex 11y ago
Because you couldn't find a meaningful way to assign Chinese characters to represent each possible combination of two of {left, right, down, rotate}, which is what the previous hex encoding mentioned can do, let alone do better. (As a novice, I can think of relatively reasonable ways to represent some of them, but no way to account for order. For example, "down left" could be "southwest" via the Zodiac animal, "left right" could be "horizontal", and "down rotate" could be "screw"... but that wouldn't help with "left down", "right left", etc.)