Generative Bad Handwriting | Hacker News Reader

Generative Bad Handwriting

avinayak.github.io

192 pointsatulvi18 comments

> Asemic writing is a wordless open semantic form of writing. The word asemic means “having no specific semantic content”. With the nonspecificity of asemic writing there comes a vacuum of meaning which is left for the reader to fill in and interpret.

Related to this I came to think of something that I found interesting a couple of days ago.

I was making music, and to add some voice to my melodies I began typed out a mixture of gibberish and actual sentences and I chopped them up and re-assembled them and gave them a pleasant sounding flow. Finally I threw some reverb on top and then I played with my keyboard to it.

When I listened to it, I found meaning in it, so then on my next session I wrote a dialog for the song between two people, and kept listening to it over the stuff I had made in the previously mentioned part of the process and tweaked the dialog.

And during all of this, I was finding a story that I don’t think I could have come up with if it wasn’t for this. And yet it was there, but it was in what I was hearing in the reassembled mish-mash of words and nonsense.

At one point I even laughed out loud to myself at the story that was coming together.

That’s pretty closely related to this asemic writing I think.

Sounds pretty neat, can you share some audio samples?

Eighteenth century generative philosophy: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Engine

Fourteenth century: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ramon_Llull#Mechanical_aspect

Ninth century BC: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/I_Ching

Also: "abstract comics"

    Picture yourself in a boat on a river
    With tangerine trees and marmalade skies

Would really like to hear some samples

As a joke I can confirm that something similar happened to me frequently when I first moved to Europe late 2000s. As a non-native English speaker and because of the thick accent of the local people I constantly mis-heard and made stories out of the completely ordinary daily conversation and amused myself, only find out later it was nothing like what I thought it was.

A beautiful “asemic” example in English is “The Jabberwocky” by Lewis Carroll which consists mostly of nonsensical words but when read by an English speaker is clearly written in the English language.

A different level of abstraction/representation from this lovely article but akin in spirit.

A link to this poem, since I was curious:

http://www.yourdailypoem.com/listpoem.jsp?poem_id=648

I glimpsed at the initial tweet sample and I thought I recognized it as Malayalam. Then I dismissed that thought and walked away to take care of the rest of Sunday. A few hours later I came back to this and wow! it is actually Malayalam :)

That was a really fun read! I do wonder how hard it'd be to make it go from random to pseudo-random in a way that would more closely resemble a real language to make it more realistic (and to stump some nerds for a while trying to look for a meaning that isn't quite there) such as making certain symbols or symbol combinations repeat more often than others, all of course while keeping it strictly meaningless.

Compare "3. THE SERIES OF APPROXIMATIONS TO ENGLISH" in http://people.math.harvard.edu/~ctm/home/text/others/shannon... (1948)

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12579661

Generating handwriting (as an amateur calligrapher) is one of my favourite exercises.

Check out this sample made with an even less flexible instrument, Context Free Art https://www.contextfreeart.org/gallery/view.php?id=945

Nice read, showing step by step the generation of this.

I don't know if you have something similar in other languages, but here in Greece when we see handwriting as tight as this one and barely readable, we call it doctors notes, instructions or prescriptions :-)

We use the exact same term in German. There seem to be some universal attributes to the handwriting of medical professionals.

We have the same concept in France, interchangeably with hieroglyphs.

I just left a pharmacy and asked (before reading this) what is the probability that the drug I got is the one the MD intended to give (handwritten prescriptions here are allowed, which on itself is concerning)

As an aside, Journey is a wonderful game[1], If you want to chill out for an hour or so, I totally recommend it.

---

[1] To be fair though, it's more of an experience than a game, but there is a layer of puzzle solving.

This is really awesome, I love it.

I wonder whether we could procedurally generate novel writing systems that are maximally information-dense while still being legible.

Huffman-code the input alphabet into glyphs such that the length of coding takes advantage of the normal complexity/size correlation, improving density. For legibility, (a) choose features that are topologically robust to handwriting noise, and (b) it may be worth using redundancy, allowing single-feature correction at the cost of losing parts of the glyph constellation but with the benefit of allowing smaller glyphs.

The latin alphabet can probably be improved, as it clearly has insufficient redundancy in some areas:

https://vistapointe.net/images/minimum-2.jpg

and too much in others:

https://www.google.com/search?q=ambigrams&tbm=isch

(optimising for speed over space leads to https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shorthand )

maybe we should train some sort of conv net model on bad handwritings, and see what kind of magic we can pull on the downstream tasks

Reply on news.ycombinator.com