Subject: The future of Chinese Computing

From: Qing Zhang <[email-masked]>
Date: Thu, 25 Oct 90 14:03:40 -0700

In my opinion, the near future (1990-2000) looks like this:

On the input side, there will be 4 methods:

1. Blind code. This method allows unique determination of characters.
No selection process is need even on the single character level. What is
called mang2-da3. It will most likely be structurally based but speedy
typing requires heavy load of memorization. It has steep learning curve
if no other supplementary inputing methods are available.

2. Continuous Pin-Yin input. This means one types in PinYin of whole
sentences, the program will intelligently make a best guess. At present,
Byx 2.0 (XLBR) achieves 90% of accuracy on the character level (i.e. 90%
of characters, not 90% of sentences) when tones are used. For those
who used it for a month or more, this rate can get to 95% due to the
matching of dictionary and his writing style. The current mechanism used
is what I call Word-Statistics method, it is based on a rough
categorization of words according to their frequency and length.
Further inclusion of grammar and association relations can raise such
accuracy to 99.9%. World knowledge is required to take care the last
0.1 %.

3. Voice input. By this I mean continuous speech recognition. It
requires all the knowledge of Continuous Pin-Yin input plus sound
recognition.

4. All the other methods.

The success of speech recognition won't spell the demise of other
methods. Can you imaging a big office in which every one is talking
to his computer?

Blind code method may be made unique by government regulation or by
the overwhelming muscle of its proponents. But it is unlikely to
happen because one particular method is clearly superior than the
others.

On the output side, speech synthesis will be widely used.
the Chinese fonts will switch from present day
dot-metrix and outline fonts to intelligent fonts. Although small
fonts may still be dot-matrix based.

I don't like Adobe PostScript for two reasons: 1. It is a readable
English text which is inevitably inefficient. Who will acturally
write a article with PostScript? Who will edit a PostScript file?
In most cases, it is machine-generated and machine-processed and no
one will read them. Then, why not use a BINARY code in the first
place?  2. Its one font set allows less than 256 characters. This
should not be too difficult to change.

Another factor is that using PostScript may cost China too much foreign
currency. PostScript may not have any market share in China for a long
time. Having no existing established market share is a strong attraction
for someone to introduce something totally new.

I welcome comments and criticisms.

Yan Yong-Xin 1990.10.25