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It's a fun idea, but I'm confused as to why the inventor decided that decoding would rely on reading the bits in order of top-to-bottom, left-to-right. To make
by kibwen 3y ago
It's a fun idea, but I'm confused as to why the inventor decided that decoding would rely on reading the bits in order of top-to-bottom, left-to-right. To make it intuitive to readers of French, you'd expect the order to be left-to-right, top to bottom. To make it intuitive to mathematicians, you might expect it to start in the upper right and proceed counterclockwise, as per the numbered quadrants of a Euclidean plane. The 16 symbols themselves will remain the same regardless of the order in which you visit the bits, but the sequential position of each symbol will change.
- tetrazine 3y agoI agree. I also think that the alphabet leans too far in the direction of making the symbols distinct, and not enough in the direction of making them transparently interpret-able as binary - which is the unique aspect of a special binary notation like this and should be emphasized. I sketched some alternatives here: https://i.imgur.com/7MZs4ji.png https://i.imgur.com/7MZs4ji.png
- klyrs 3y agoThe bibi-symbols are quite bad for those of us with dyslexia, because mirror variants are so common. Yours are actually worse for that; every rotation of every symbol is present! Serifs could help.
- tetrazine 3y agoYeah, that makes sense. Given your account, it sounds like the 2D paradigm of the bibi-symbols (which I'm following) is fundamentally bad for interpretability with dyslexia, because it results in a lot of symmetries. Even when considering the population of people without dyslexia, I can't think of examples of vernacular human alphabets that have many pairs of distinct symbols that are identical under some symmetry. So maybe symmetry is an alphabet design antipattern.
- layer8 3y agoI was confused that some of the combinations of single-bit shapes don’t match the shapes of the corresponding two-bit combinations. For example, the shapes for 0001 (╮) and 0010 (╯) combined result in the shape for 1100 (⊃), not in the shape for 0011 (⊂). Of course, if that shape-combining logic was followed consistently, the circle would have to be 1111, not 0000.
- pama 3y agoThe bibi binary notation encodes shift of bits very interesting ways. Take 1, 2, or 3 (only some of the last two bits set) and shift by two bits and you get a left-right mirror image; take 4, 5, shift by one and you get upside-down mirror. I think the notation is awesome.