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Comment by soperj | Hacker News Reader

Curious why they go through each letter saying yes or no, instead of just teaching them how to pick letters based on a binary output (ie: a= 00000, b=00001)? you'd think the characters per minute would increase dramatically.

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Morse code, where dot is ‘think about tennis’ and dash is ‘think about home’?

https://amp.theguardian.com/science/2010/feb/03/vegetative-s...

It occurs to me that this is a binary search on the alphabet, but could be made into a much more human-compatible format: “Is the letter in the first half of the alphabet?” “Is the letter between A and F?”

yeah, I guess you'd start with the first 13/last 13 and break it down in halves from there. It would take only 6 choices to pick a letter. I still think memorizing the binary version of the letters would be faster, and wouldn't take all that long considering the amount of use.

The code is (or can be) the same either way. I imagine after a few days the user would memorize the codes for the letters and skip the prompts.

On a related note, one character per minute is about the same speed as the first trans-atlantic telegraph cable in 1858.

You want a variable length code that takes into account letter frequencies.

I'm not sure that's exactly human friendly. Can people answer questions like that without training? Would the amount of thought needed create a noise signal?

If they have vision, you could ask "Which of these two sets is the letter in", where the sets were dynamically generated by predictive software.

There’s relevant scenes to this in the Stephen Hawking biopic, The Theory of Everything.

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