14 ms·

Boustrophedon

82 points by breck 9y ago

deleted 9y ago
[deleted]
pavel_lishin 9y ago
What was the reason for writing this way on stone? It can't be to keep text aligned - you can just walk to the left and keep going, and the text will stay aligned just as well as if you'd been writing right-to-left.
- gumby 9y ago
  What is the reason for writing always in the same direction? I don't ask this as a joke: is there seriously a cognitive advantage to having to pass your eye all the way back to the beginning of the next line (whether you read right-left, left-right or top-bottom) vs immediately dropping down and continue reading? On the other hand I spent a lot of time in high school and university reading pictures of boustrophedon greek texts and once you are used to it you don't even think of it. Likewise R-L texts -- my difficulty with handwritten arabic is the wide variation in characters; the directionality rapidly became automatic, even in mixed-language texts. In the case of boustrophedon texts, a dominating factor is the sheer irregularity of character shapes (nothing was machine made) and worse, a lot of the black and white photos in books are old, crummy ones which make the deciphering even more "interesting". And this was all before the development of spaces between the words too, and at a time when character shapes were evolving. Regardless, all written languages I know of (even counting Korean, which is slightly different in-word), seem to have picked a single direction as a dominant, and even before the development of mechanised writing (which would make the characters extremely regular, which might drive a tend to optimize). So there could be some cognitive benefit. I could imagine there's an advantage in that you could train a NN in your visual system to recognize regularly-shaped characters and do look-ahead, but I have seen no studies of it.
  - rflrob 9y ago
    I wonder if the standardization of directions, rather than boustrophedonic writing, is due to the technology of paper and ink. If you're carving into stone or clay, then your hand isn't as likely to smudge the already written text.
    - gumby 9y ago
      I used to think that, but a bit of reflection puts that to bed: 1 - The earliest ink-and-paper writing in the Middle East was in Egypt, where the pen writing mostly followed inscription, being a little free form in ordering. AFAIK the old language didn't acquire an alphabetic system until Greek colonization (cf Coptic, which is (evolved) pharaonic Egyptian written with essentially Greek characters). That latter is indeed a L-R system, but has been largely replaced with the R-L Arabic. 2 - Your hand is likely to smudge R-L systems unless you're left handed which most people are not. 3 - The other in-and-paper system, Chinese, until recently (couple of hundred years ago) used only brushes, not pens, so smudging was a non-issue. Top-bottom though could be attested in this way; it's better to draw the brush rather than push it, so starting at the top of the page makes sense, but why R-L vs L-R...? I don't know about the the third independent site of the development of writing, the Americas, as the jesuits burned almost 100% of the books, and so mostly we only have monumental writing, which doesn't address this question. AFAIK all the indigenous Alphabets of India are L-R (Urdu is R-L due to its use of an arabic alphabet)
      - vorg 9y ago
        > Your hand is likely to smudge R-L systems unless you're left handed which most people are not Arabic was originally read Right-to-Left, but written Top-to-Bottom, leftwards, on the scroll so smudging by right-handed writers wasn't an issue. A completed scroll was then hung sideways on the wall for people to read. In fact, by writing Arabic T-B(leftwards) instead of L-R(downwards in columns) like Greek was at the time, smudging became less of an issue. The Arabs could roll up the left side of their scroll sooner without smudging or pausing, whereas the Greeks had to leave the entire column they'd just written exposed while the ink on the bottom rows was drying.
- 482794793792894 9y ago
  In our system, it becomes challenging to find the start of the next line when reading long lines of text. This is pretty much the main reason why sheets of paper or modern webpages are only as wide as they are.
- Grustaf 9y ago
  Early writing wasn't as standardised as it is now, and most reading would be done aloud in more or less formal circumstances, so the maximum efficiency we strive for today was probably not a consideration. And since writing on stone is a pretty cumbersome activity it was probably natural to continue writing next to where you just finished a symbol. Note that cuneiform (which of course predates Greek by a wide margin), written on clay with a reed, was not written boustrophedon. On the other hand, Egyptian hieroglyphics, though carved in stone, weren't either - instead they were very flexible on writing direction. I suppose my only real point is that the Ancients didn't see a great need for a fixed writing direction.
- panglott 9y ago
  Writing involves a couple of different metaphors; the main one is the correspondence of a written symbol with an oralsound. Another one is that a linear sequence of glyphs matches a linear sequence of sounds. Obviously there are mechanical problems with fitting a long sequence of letters on a limited space. Boustephedron maintains the linear sequence of the letters by going back and forth. People quickly learned that it's much easier to read if you instead cut each line into segments and start each segment on one side of a page, but this breaks the visual metaphor of a continuous line of written symbols matching a continuous line of sounds. Inventing writing is really, really, really hard. Just as, given that we learned to read so long ago, it's hard to remember how hard it is to learn to read. Boustephedron is like training wheels for writing.
bqe 9y ago
Fun story about this: in college we had to make a barcode reader out of a simple phototransistor. To scan the barcode, you had to slide the device along a piece of paper. The barcode scanner had to be isolated from ambient light so that we'd get a good reading. However, our project was to read a lot of information via the barcode (a paragraph of English text encoded as Code 39 or similar, can't remember the exact details), so it wouldn't fit on one line of paper. Lots of teams decided to implement complex heuristics to determine when to ignore readings when lifting the barcode reader off of the page and to scan the next line. But we decided to use boustrophedon to generate the page with the barcodes on it so that we never had to lift the barcode scanner off of the page. You just had to scan left to right, then down one line, and then right to left.
cattleprodigy 9y ago
http://boustro.com/app http://boustro.com/app
- chaosmachine 9y ago
  It's surprisingly difficult to stop my eyes from snapping back to the left side after each line.
  - 482794793792894 9y ago
    I also find that my brain wrongly pattern-matches words that form a different word when reading the letters in reverse. So, I for example often misread "was" as "saw" or "on" as "no".
kjhughes 9y ago
I can see an advantage to having the beginning of the next line immediately beneath the end of the previous line -- it avoids a greater refocus adjustment distance to start new lines. This would greatly reduce mistakes where the nth or (n+2)th line is started by mistake instead of the (n+1)th. However, I don't immediately see an advantage to flipping the letters across the vertical axis for each new line.
- tene 9y ago
  My best guess there is that flipping the letters encodes the reading direction of the line, to make it easier to pick up reading at any specific place.
  - Nagnazul 9y ago
    Hi, this is completely unrelated to this discussion but I can't find any other way to message someone on this website. In an earlier comment you mentioned being signed up for cryonics: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10209152 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10209152 I'm currently considering the procedure and I'd love to talk with someone who has signed up for it. Could you send me an email please? Nagnazul at gmail dot com Thank you very much!
- gnicholas 9y ago
  If you're interested in this concept, you might try BeeLine Reader, which uses line-wrapping color gradients to avoid the line transition errors you describe (and doesn't involve letter flipping). Disclosure: I am the founder! http://www.beelinereader.com http://www.beelinereader.com
  - timthelion 9y ago
    Please add real Boustrophedon! I'm so interested in what it is like to read longer documents like this.
    - gnicholas 9y ago
vec 9y ago
With enough practice, I could see this being much easier to read. There's no jumping from the end of one line and searching for the next, plus each line is visually distinct from the ones immediately above and below. I wonder how much text I would have to read like this before it felt natural?
- gumby 9y ago
  > I wonder how much text I would have to read like this before it felt natural? If you see my note above I mention that it wasn't a big deal. More to your question, frankly learning ancient Greek grammar was far more painful -- the effort to learn to parse old inscriptions was in the noise compared to the effort to understand what the hell they were writing.
wakamoleguy 9y ago
Here's a tangentially related article about a crossword-solving program called Dr. Fill, which got tripped up by boustrophedon in its debut at the American Crossword Puzzle Tournament in 2012. http://www.crosswordtournament.com/articles/iw032212.htm http://www.crosswordtournament.com/articles/iw032212.htm
mkohler 9y ago
I first encountered the word in the excellent book, Expert C Programming, by Peter van der Linden, who explained that declarations in C are read boustrophedonically.
- morsch 9y ago
  In C++, on the other hand, they're read stroustruphedonically.
- 3131s 9y ago
  I encountered "boustrophedon" a long time ago because it is one of the favorite words of the creator of the niche-but-awesome phrontistery.info http://phrontistery.info/favourite.html http://phrontistery.info/favourite.html
thriftwy 9y ago
I was sure it will be a very illegal substance by that name.
jagger27 9y ago
My Latin 101 prof used to go through the rows of seats in boustrophedon order, his words, to read passages from Wheelock. Don't miss that class very much.
DonHopkins 9y ago
The Floyd Steinberg error diffusion dithering algorithm can use a boustrophedonous scan order to eliminate the diagonal geometric artifacts you get by scanning each row the same direction. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Floyd%E2%80%93Steinberg_dithering https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Floyd%E2%80%93Steinberg_dither... "In some implementations, the horizontal direction of scan alternates between lines; this is called "serpentine scanning" or boustrophedon transform dithering." I implemented some eight bit cellular automata heat diffusion rules with error diffusion, which accumulated an unfortunate drift up and to the right because of the scan order. Rudy Rucker pointed out the problem: http://donhopkins.com/mediawiki/index.php/CAM6_Simulator http://donhopkins.com/mediawiki/index.php/CAM6_Simulator "Rudy Rucker: I feel like you might have some kind of bug in your update code, an off-by-one thing or a problem with the buffer flipping. My reason is that I see persistent upward drift in the action, like if I mouse drag a blob it generally moves up. Also the patterns appearing in the blob aren't uniform. I mean...this IS supposed to be the 2D Rug rule, isn't it?" So instead of scanning back and forth boustrophedoniously (which wouldn't eliminate the vertical drift, just the horizontal drift), I rotated the direction of scanning 90 degrees each frame ("spinning scan") to spread the drift out evenly in all directions over time. https://github.com/SimHacker/CAM6/blob/master/javascript/CAM6.js#L4423 https://github.com/SimHacker/CAM6/blob/master/javascript/CAM... // Rotate the direction of scanning 90 degrees every step, // to cancel out the dithering artifacts that would cause the // heat to drift up and to the right. That totally canceled out the unwanted drifting and geometric dithering artifacts! That made it possible to cultivate much more subtle (or not-so-subtle) effects, like dynamically switching per-cell between different anisotropic convolution kernels (see the "Twistier Marble" rule for an extreme example). http://donhopkins.com/home/CAM6 http://donhopkins.com/home/CAM6
DonHopkins 9y ago
Scott Kim has a wonderful talent at designing "ambigrams". Check out his classic book "Inversions" and his gallery of more recent work! http://www.scottkim.com.previewc40.carrierzone.com/inversions/ http://www.scottkim.com.previewc40.carrierzone.com/inversion... An inversion is a word or name written so it reads in more than one way. For instance, the word Inversions above is my name upside down. Douglas Hofstadter coined ambigram as the generic word for inversions. I drew my first inversion in 1975 in an art class, wrote a book called Inversions in 1981, and am now doing animated inversions.
d--b 9y ago
that could have been useful to read text on a glass wall from both sides... too bad that they had not invented it yet.
khedoros1 9y ago
I used to write some of my college notes this way, when I was trying to make myself thing more about what I was writing.
blt 9y ago
See also: the Boustrophedon cellular decomposition for robotic 2D coverage path planning, e.g. for mowing, painting, vacuuming, etc. The method works by decomposing an arbitrary environment into a union of smaller, simplified shapes that are easy to cover with a boustrophedon motion - moving back and forth like an ox plowing. http://planning.cs.uiuc.edu/node352.html http://planning.cs.uiuc.edu/node352.html
psykotic 9y ago
Older NVIDIA GPUs (and maybe current ones) used an alternating-direction scheme for coarse rasterization which was called (somewhat tongue in cheek) boustrophedonic rasterization. The idea was to have more spatial locality for the coverage samples issued by the rasterizer compared to a conventional same-direction scheme. Spatial locality in the two-dimensional sense correlates to spatial locality in the texture cache, for example.
icanhackit 9y ago
And down the Wikipedia rabbit hole... IBM 1360 Photo-Digital Storage System: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IBM_1360 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IBM_1360
optimate 9y ago
My son would write like this when he was first learning to write. I was constantly having to prompt him to carriage return, and write the letters the correct way round.
boustrophedon 9y ago
I use this as my handle online in a few places (github, irc). Hi!
- WorkLifeBalance 9y ago
  My first reaction to seeing this headline was recognizing it as a username. I thought that was here but given you are newly registered it must have been the place with the ducks.
  - boustrophedon 9y ago
    I am not familiar with "the place with the ducks" as far as I know, so you probably have the wrong person.
jaclaz 9y ago
More or less the ancient Greeks - in their simplicity - chose to use ASCII 10 (newline/line feed) instead of 13+10 (carriage return+line feed). ;-) https://blog.codinghorror.com/the-great-newline-schism/ https://blog.codinghorror.com/the-great-newline-schism/
- maaark 9y ago
  >Even if you rule out unicode and stick to old-school ASCII, like most Facebook relationships â€¦ it's complicated. Brilliant, encoding problems in an article about encoding!
YeGoblynQueenne 9y ago
>> boustrophedonically Such a pitty I don't play Scrabble...

82 points by breck 9y ago

deleted 9y ago

[deleted]

What was the reason for writing this way on stone? It can't be to keep text aligned - you can just walk to the left and keep going, and the text will stay aligned just as well as if you'd been writing right-to-left.

gumby 9y ago
What is the reason for writing always in the same direction? I don't ask this as a joke: is there seriously a cognitive advantage to having to pass your eye all the way back to the beginning of the next line (whether you read right-left, left-right or top-bottom) vs immediately dropping down and continue reading? On the other hand I spent a lot of time in high school and university reading pictures of boustrophedon greek texts and once you are used to it you don't even think of it. Likewise R-L texts -- my difficulty with handwritten arabic is the wide variation in characters; the directionality rapidly became automatic, even in mixed-language texts. In the case of boustrophedon texts, a dominating factor is the sheer irregularity of character shapes (nothing was machine made) and worse, a lot of the black and white photos in books are old, crummy ones which make the deciphering even more "interesting". And this was all before the development of spaces between the words too, and at a time when character shapes were evolving. Regardless, all written languages I know of (even counting Korean, which is slightly different in-word), seem to have picked a single direction as a dominant, and even before the development of mechanised writing (which would make the characters extremely regular, which might drive a tend to optimize). So there could be some cognitive benefit. I could imagine there's an advantage in that you could train a NN in your visual system to recognize regularly-shaped characters and do look-ahead, but I have seen no studies of it.
- rflrob 9y ago
  I wonder if the standardization of directions, rather than boustrophedonic writing, is due to the technology of paper and ink. If you're carving into stone or clay, then your hand isn't as likely to smudge the already written text.
  - gumby 9y ago
    I used to think that, but a bit of reflection puts that to bed: 1 - The earliest ink-and-paper writing in the Middle East was in Egypt, where the pen writing mostly followed inscription, being a little free form in ordering. AFAIK the old language didn't acquire an alphabetic system until Greek colonization (cf Coptic, which is (evolved) pharaonic Egyptian written with essentially Greek characters). That latter is indeed a L-R system, but has been largely replaced with the R-L Arabic. 2 - Your hand is likely to smudge R-L systems unless you're left handed which most people are not. 3 - The other in-and-paper system, Chinese, until recently (couple of hundred years ago) used only brushes, not pens, so smudging was a non-issue. Top-bottom though could be attested in this way; it's better to draw the brush rather than push it, so starting at the top of the page makes sense, but why R-L vs L-R...? I don't know about the the third independent site of the development of writing, the Americas, as the jesuits burned almost 100% of the books, and so mostly we only have monumental writing, which doesn't address this question. AFAIK all the indigenous Alphabets of India are L-R (Urdu is R-L due to its use of an arabic alphabet)
    - vorg 9y ago
      > Your hand is likely to smudge R-L systems unless you're left handed which most people are not Arabic was originally read Right-to-Left, but written Top-to-Bottom, leftwards, on the scroll so smudging by right-handed writers wasn't an issue. A completed scroll was then hung sideways on the wall for people to read. In fact, by writing Arabic T-B(leftwards) instead of L-R(downwards in columns) like Greek was at the time, smudging became less of an issue. The Arabs could roll up the left side of their scroll sooner without smudging or pausing, whereas the Greeks had to leave the entire column they'd just written exposed while the ink on the bottom rows was drying.
482794793792894 9y ago
In our system, it becomes challenging to find the start of the next line when reading long lines of text. This is pretty much the main reason why sheets of paper or modern webpages are only as wide as they are.
Grustaf 9y ago
Early writing wasn't as standardised as it is now, and most reading would be done aloud in more or less formal circumstances, so the maximum efficiency we strive for today was probably not a consideration. And since writing on stone is a pretty cumbersome activity it was probably natural to continue writing next to where you just finished a symbol. Note that cuneiform (which of course predates Greek by a wide margin), written on clay with a reed, was not written boustrophedon. On the other hand, Egyptian hieroglyphics, though carved in stone, weren't either - instead they were very flexible on writing direction. I suppose my only real point is that the Ancients didn't see a great need for a fixed writing direction.
panglott 9y ago
Writing involves a couple of different metaphors; the main one is the correspondence of a written symbol with an oralsound. Another one is that a linear sequence of glyphs matches a linear sequence of sounds. Obviously there are mechanical problems with fitting a long sequence of letters on a limited space. Boustephedron maintains the linear sequence of the letters by going back and forth. People quickly learned that it's much easier to read if you instead cut each line into segments and start each segment on one side of a page, but this breaks the visual metaphor of a continuous line of written symbols matching a continuous line of sounds. Inventing writing is really, really, really hard. Just as, given that we learned to read so long ago, it's hard to remember how hard it is to learn to read. Boustephedron is like training wheels for writing.

bqe 9y ago

Fun story about this: in college we had to make a barcode reader out of a simple phototransistor. To scan the barcode, you had to slide the device along a piece of paper. The barcode scanner had to be isolated from ambient light so that we'd get a good reading. However, our project was to read a lot of information via the barcode (a paragraph of English text encoded as Code 39 or similar, can't remember the exact details), so it wouldn't fit on one line of paper. Lots of teams decided to implement complex heuristics to determine when to ignore readings when lifting the barcode reader off of the page and to scan the next line. But we decided to use boustrophedon to generate the page with the barcodes on it so that we never had to lift the barcode scanner off of the page. You just had to scan left to right, then down one line, and then right to left.

cattleprodigy 9y ago

http://boustro.com/app http://boustro.com/app

chaosmachine 9y ago
It's surprisingly difficult to stop my eyes from snapping back to the left side after each line.
- 482794793792894 9y ago
  I also find that my brain wrongly pattern-matches words that form a different word when reading the letters in reverse. So, I for example often misread "was" as "saw" or "on" as "no".

kjhughes 9y ago

I can see an advantage to having the beginning of the next line immediately beneath the end of the previous line -- it avoids a greater refocus adjustment distance to start new lines. This would greatly reduce mistakes where the nth or (n+2)th line is started by mistake instead of the (n+1)th. However, I don't immediately see an advantage to flipping the letters across the vertical axis for each new line.

tene 9y ago
My best guess there is that flipping the letters encodes the reading direction of the line, to make it easier to pick up reading at any specific place.
- Nagnazul 9y ago
  Hi, this is completely unrelated to this discussion but I can't find any other way to message someone on this website. In an earlier comment you mentioned being signed up for cryonics: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10209152 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10209152 I'm currently considering the procedure and I'd love to talk with someone who has signed up for it. Could you send me an email please? Nagnazul at gmail dot com Thank you very much!
gnicholas 9y ago
If you're interested in this concept, you might try BeeLine Reader, which uses line-wrapping color gradients to avoid the line transition errors you describe (and doesn't involve letter flipping). Disclosure: I am the founder! http://www.beelinereader.com http://www.beelinereader.com
- timthelion 9y ago
  Please add real Boustrophedon! I'm so interested in what it is like to read longer documents like this.
  - gnicholas 9y ago

vec 9y ago

With enough practice, I could see this being much easier to read. There's no jumping from the end of one line and searching for the next, plus each line is visually distinct from the ones immediately above and below. I wonder how much text I would have to read like this before it felt natural?

gumby 9y ago
> I wonder how much text I would have to read like this before it felt natural? If you see my note above I mention that it wasn't a big deal. More to your question, frankly learning ancient Greek grammar was far more painful -- the effort to learn to parse old inscriptions was in the noise compared to the effort to understand what the hell they were writing.

wakamoleguy 9y ago

Here's a tangentially related article about a crossword-solving program called Dr. Fill, which got tripped up by boustrophedon in its debut at the American Crossword Puzzle Tournament in 2012. http://www.crosswordtournament.com/articles/iw032212.htm http://www.crosswordtournament.com/articles/iw032212.htm

mkohler 9y ago

I first encountered the word in the excellent book, Expert C Programming, by Peter van der Linden, who explained that declarations in C are read boustrophedonically.

morsch 9y ago
In C++, on the other hand, they're read stroustruphedonically.
3131s 9y ago
I encountered "boustrophedon" a long time ago because it is one of the favorite words of the creator of the niche-but-awesome phrontistery.info http://phrontistery.info/favourite.html http://phrontistery.info/favourite.html

thriftwy 9y ago

I was sure it will be a very illegal substance by that name.

jagger27 9y ago

My Latin 101 prof used to go through the rows of seats in boustrophedon order, his words, to read passages from Wheelock. Don't miss that class very much.

DonHopkins 9y ago

The Floyd Steinberg error diffusion dithering algorithm can use a boustrophedonous scan order to eliminate the diagonal geometric artifacts you get by scanning each row the same direction. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Floyd%E2%80%93Steinberg_dithering https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Floyd%E2%80%93Steinberg_dither... "In some implementations, the horizontal direction of scan alternates between lines; this is called "serpentine scanning" or boustrophedon transform dithering." I implemented some eight bit cellular automata heat diffusion rules with error diffusion, which accumulated an unfortunate drift up and to the right because of the scan order. Rudy Rucker pointed out the problem: http://donhopkins.com/mediawiki/index.php/CAM6_Simulator http://donhopkins.com/mediawiki/index.php/CAM6_Simulator "Rudy Rucker: I feel like you might have some kind of bug in your update code, an off-by-one thing or a problem with the buffer flipping. My reason is that I see persistent upward drift in the action, like if I mouse drag a blob it generally moves up. Also the patterns appearing in the blob aren't uniform. I mean...this IS supposed to be the 2D Rug rule, isn't it?" So instead of scanning back and forth boustrophedoniously (which wouldn't eliminate the vertical drift, just the horizontal drift), I rotated the direction of scanning 90 degrees each frame ("spinning scan") to spread the drift out evenly in all directions over time. https://github.com/SimHacker/CAM6/blob/master/javascript/CAM6.js#L4423 https://github.com/SimHacker/CAM6/blob/master/javascript/CAM... // Rotate the direction of scanning 90 degrees every step, // to cancel out the dithering artifacts that would cause the // heat to drift up and to the right. That totally canceled out the unwanted drifting and geometric dithering artifacts! That made it possible to cultivate much more subtle (or not-so-subtle) effects, like dynamically switching per-cell between different anisotropic convolution kernels (see the "Twistier Marble" rule for an extreme example). http://donhopkins.com/home/CAM6 http://donhopkins.com/home/CAM6

DonHopkins 9y ago

Scott Kim has a wonderful talent at designing "ambigrams". Check out his classic book "Inversions" and his gallery of more recent work! http://www.scottkim.com.previewc40.carrierzone.com/inversions/ http://www.scottkim.com.previewc40.carrierzone.com/inversion... An inversion is a word or name written so it reads in more than one way. For instance, the word Inversions above is my name upside down. Douglas Hofstadter coined ambigram as the generic word for inversions. I drew my first inversion in 1975 in an art class, wrote a book called Inversions in 1981, and am now doing animated inversions.

d--b 9y ago

that could have been useful to read text on a glass wall from both sides... too bad that they had not invented it yet.

khedoros1 9y ago

I used to write some of my college notes this way, when I was trying to make myself thing more about what I was writing.

blt 9y ago

See also: the Boustrophedon cellular decomposition for robotic 2D coverage path planning, e.g. for mowing, painting, vacuuming, etc. The method works by decomposing an arbitrary environment into a union of smaller, simplified shapes that are easy to cover with a boustrophedon motion - moving back and forth like an ox plowing. http://planning.cs.uiuc.edu/node352.html http://planning.cs.uiuc.edu/node352.html

psykotic 9y ago

Older NVIDIA GPUs (and maybe current ones) used an alternating-direction scheme for coarse rasterization which was called (somewhat tongue in cheek) boustrophedonic rasterization. The idea was to have more spatial locality for the coverage samples issued by the rasterizer compared to a conventional same-direction scheme. Spatial locality in the two-dimensional sense correlates to spatial locality in the texture cache, for example.

icanhackit 9y ago

And down the Wikipedia rabbit hole... IBM 1360 Photo-Digital Storage System: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IBM_1360 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IBM_1360

optimate 9y ago

My son would write like this when he was first learning to write. I was constantly having to prompt him to carriage return, and write the letters the correct way round.

boustrophedon 9y ago

I use this as my handle online in a few places (github, irc). Hi!

WorkLifeBalance 9y ago
My first reaction to seeing this headline was recognizing it as a username. I thought that was here but given you are newly registered it must have been the place with the ducks.
- boustrophedon 9y ago
  I am not familiar with "the place with the ducks" as far as I know, so you probably have the wrong person.

jaclaz 9y ago

More or less the ancient Greeks - in their simplicity - chose to use ASCII 10 (newline/line feed) instead of 13+10 (carriage return+line feed). ;-) https://blog.codinghorror.com/the-great-newline-schism/ https://blog.codinghorror.com/the-great-newline-schism/

maaark 9y ago
>Even if you rule out unicode and stick to old-school ASCII, like most Facebook relationships â€¦ it's complicated. Brilliant, encoding problems in an article about encoding!

YeGoblynQueenne 9y ago

>> boustrophedonically Such a pitty I don't play Scrabble...