
Words that do Handstands - hardmath123
http://hardmath123.github.io/ambigrams.html
======
jwineinger
The Princess Bride disc cover has one --
[https://i.imgur.com/CdxyMd9.jpg](https://i.imgur.com/CdxyMd9.jpg)

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GimbalLock
The “e” in “Bride” is absolutely masterful.

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LeifCarrotson
It also shows that OP's brute force approach is overly constricting - the
stylized P forms both d and e upside down.

Still in awe of the artist who came up with that one.

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rom1v
In "Gare du Nord" in Paris:
[http://www.patricehamel.org/index.php?page=2&article=23](http://www.patricehamel.org/index.php?page=2&article=23)

entrée / sortie (entrance / exit)

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kingbirdy
That's not quite the same though - that's legible after reflection, ambigrams
are rotations.

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rom1v
That's a rotation in 3D ;-)

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gugagore
No, that's not right. You can't rotate your left hand to look like your right.
But they are reflections of each other.

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radeklew
But text is already symmetrical along the z axis, so it works.

Say your hands were 2d, so the backs looked the same as the palms. Now hold
your hands so that you're looking at the palms and the fingers are pointing
up. Rotate your left hand 180° along the y axis, and it would look like your
right.

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gugagore
I misinterpreted the comment to mean a 2D reflection is a 3D rotation, in
general. Thanks for pointing out the comment was about this specific case.

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kjhughes
I've always admired Sun Microsystem's ambigram logo:

[https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/d/d5/SUN_micr...](https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/d/d5/SUN_microsystems_logo_ambigram.png)

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koliber
I'm a fan of SONOS's logo:
[https://lh6.googleusercontent.com/-Px2Steg_XRM/AAAAAAAAAAI/A...](https://lh6.googleusercontent.com/-Px2Steg_XRM/AAAAAAAAAAI/AAAAAAAAFa4/kpB3EVdNHGw/s0-c-k-
no-ns/photo.jpg)

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kibwen
It seems almost like cheating to make an ambigram out of a palindrome composed
exclusively of rotationally-symmetric characters. :P

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bromuro
Still, they’ve found it. A lucky coincidence isn’t it.

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markleeville
In high school I would make these and post them on DeviantArt. Was scrolling
the Reddit front page and saw my work tattooed on a man's arm. Shocked, to say
the least.

[https://twitter.com/jacknjellify/status/820346345429078016](https://twitter.com/jacknjellify/status/820346345429078016)

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xamuel
The approach here is unnecessarily constrained because the author is seeking
glyphs in advance for all two-letter pairs, "one size fits all", so it's
unsurprising that the results are rather ugly and hard to read. If the font
were allowed to depend on the desired words, that would add flexibility which
might allow automatic production of much prettier solutions such as the
artistic "earth air fire water" example (or jwineinger's Princess Bride
example)

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doomrobo
It would also make the search space exponentially bigger

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toxik
Well gosh darn it we didn’t invent GPUs just to mine bitcoins!

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YeGoblynQueenne
"Exponential" is an anagram for "More processing power won't save you".

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Scarblac
Reminded me of this drawing of the alphabet:
[https://images.app.goo.gl/3pR7TQqohUDqM3hf8](https://images.app.goo.gl/3pR7TQqohUDqM3hf8)

It's not the same, but it's left-right symmetrical instead and really neat.

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covercash
Open in new tab, that link hijacks the back button in mobile Safari.

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tarikozket
tip: you can press and hold `back button` in mobile safari to see a tab's
history as a list.

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yorwba
The text is very faint in many places, so I applied some thresholding in GIMP
to make it crisper:
[https://i.imgur.com/cpC3PK9.png](https://i.imgur.com/cpC3PK9.png)

There's probably a way to adapt the training process to create black and white
images directly, e.g. by evaluating the classifiers on the thresholded images,
but passing the gradients through to the underlying continuously-valued
images.

~~~
vectorEQ
that is actually much nicer on the eyes. nice one.

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andrewla
The author here used the MNIST set of handwritten numbers, but that seems an
unnecessary constraint. An infinite (practically) training set is available in
the form of existing fonts, which can be used to generate a training set. A
set of distortions can be added in automatically to give the net a little more
information to work with, and then this same methodology can be applied to
generate the single glyph ambigrams.

bigram<->character ambigrams are also feasible, but the search space gets
pretty big.

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kibwen
_> This process lets us “dream” of images representing whichever characters we
want._

Aside, I'm really psyched at the idea that the word "dream" has a chance to
become an established term of art here. _Do_ androids dream of electric sheep?
Well, it depends on the model you've trained them with, obviously.

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teddyh
A lot of ambigrams can be found here:

[http://cerulean.st/ambigram/indexold.html](http://cerulean.st/ambigram/indexold.html)

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dasyatidprime
At the risk of overexposure, there were also some strange claims made in 2009
whose source seems to have vanished but which I recall being based on a
different machine ambigram generator, resulting in Cerulean responding with
this 7×7 half-turn rotational ambigram grid (where transposing the matrix
flips the images, so that there's 28 distinct images presented in 49 cells):
[https://ceruleanst.livejournal.com/177992.html?nojs=1](https://ceruleanst.livejournal.com/177992.html?nojs=1)

~~~
bazzargh
you can see the strange claim here:
[http://web.archive.org/web/20110702084440/http://www.ambigra...](http://web.archive.org/web/20110702084440/http://www.ambigram.com/ambigram-
card-game)

 _" The Ambigram deck itself seems impossible at first, and in fact, it would
have been impossible just a few years ago. No human being could have designed
it alone, even if they possessed several lifetimes to work on the problem."_

which is exactly what Cerulean's page refutes - it's a hand-designed 7x7 grid
where each word transforms into each of the other words.

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gumby
This is interesting due to the tight constraints of the roman alphabet

Islamic writing in the Arabic script has made use of these tricks for
centuries as its script has built-in affordances for it.

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mcphage
The ambigram in Angels and Demons really annoyed me—there it was, and it was
very pretty, but the book claimed that "nobody had ever been able to create
such a thing". Yet clearly Dan Brown (or an illustrator he hired) could. It
took me out of the book some.

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frankus
Would be great if someone could come up with a "Pull" sticker that would read
"Push" when mirrored.

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k_vi
[http://www.johnlangdon.net/works/angels-
demons/](http://www.johnlangdon.net/works/angels-demons/)

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pmiller2
At first, I thought this was going to be about words that are autoantonyms.
Here are 25 examples: [https://mentalfloss.com/article/57032/25-words-are-
their-own...](https://mentalfloss.com/article/57032/25-words-are-their-own-
opposites)

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lukeholder
NOW NO SWIMS ON MON

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cerberusss
That's a good one, I like it.

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jnbiche
Any good recommendations for a good, discrete gradient descent tutorial, text
or Youtube, assuming only calculus?

It's one of those things I learned the basics of several years ago and have
now forgotten (which frustrates me, but is understandable since I don't use
machine learning at work).

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Stratoscope
If you like this, check out _Inversions_ by Scott Kim.

[https://www.google.com/search?q=scott+kim+inversions&tbm=isc...](https://www.google.com/search?q=scott+kim+inversions&tbm=isch)

The book is out of print, but you can find used copies. It has a Foreword by
Douglas Hofstadter and a Backword by Jef Raskin.

I bought an autographed copy at a computer show in San Francisco on March 21,
1982. The way Scott autographed the books was by inventing and drawing your
own personalized inversion on the spot! Mine reads with my first name right
side up and my last name if you turn it upside down.

One clever thing I just noticed: my first name has "ae" in it and my last name
has "ea", so that made a natural way to link the inverted names together.

Needless to say, this is one of my most treasured books. Thanks Scott!

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garaetjjte
I can't read at all what is written on first image. I guess I couldn't on
generated images either, but with captions they are barely recognizable.

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alexmlamb
One idea: try using adversarial training (i.e. train the classifier on
examples with bounded perturbations which maximize error).

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Jun8
If you’re into general wordplay I highly recommend _Making the Alphabet
Dance_.

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duckqlz
reminds me of:

[https://flipscript.com](https://flipscript.com)

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gao8a
Sweet, love this tattoo generator! ;)

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Schmazo
WOWS IS MOM.

(WOWS IS MOM standing on her head is a statement, not a question)

