
Unker Non-Linear Writing System - strogonoff
https://s.ai/nlws/
======
skoodge
What a fascinating concept, especially this part:

> We have only started to develop how to hold a conversation in UNLWS itself.
> As we currently have it, it's a very, very different kind of thing than
> linear atomic turntaking. Rather, it's a sort of ongoing mutual edit of a
> shared structure, where revision history playback (or live observation)
> expresses the 'conversational' tone expected by linear conversation, and the
> fixed form expresses the integrated totality of what the participants have
> expressed. Different ink colors help to distinguish participants, but there
> are no boundaries preventing one participant from using another's ink as
> part of their own expressions. Indeed, there are a few special
> conversational variants of glyphs which are meant to be easier to drop in to
> an already-drawn passage than the normal forms; these are recognizable by
> their use of two ink colors. (It’s a pity that it’s so fiddly to edit pencil
> or pen drawings.)

I can't help but wonder how this would look like applied to instant messaging:
We are used to seeing our conversations arranged in differently colored
bubbles, but how would our form of communication change if we instead
communicated on a collaborative surface where we could freely choose which
color to use and where to add our thoughts? (Similar to how Slack already
introduces a small amount of non-linearity in the form of threaded
conversations, but applied on a much larger scale, so that non-linear
collaborative communication becomes the default instead of an afterthought.)

~~~
karl-j
I took note of that part too, it reminds me of this article [1] posted on HN
recently. It contrasts the fleeting and context dependent flows of posts on
social media ("the stream") with enduring wiki style interlinking of posts
where the context is embedded in the linking ("the garden"). It consider it in
the context of personal note taking, and I feel what you mention is the garden
approach to conversation, as opposed to the normal stream approach.

I wonder what the medium would have to be like to be useful for instant
messaging, since not all things being said need to endure or benefit from
linking. Maybe the ink fades unless new things are written nearby, proving its
relevance?

[1] [https://hapgood.us/2015/10/17/the-garden-and-the-stream-a-
te...](https://hapgood.us/2015/10/17/the-garden-and-the-stream-a-
technopastoral/)

~~~
strogonoff
Perhaps well-implemented collaborative sketching could be the medium that
turns conversations from streams into gardens (and it’s the only way of
chatting in UNLWS I can imagine).

Some of the challenges I see:

— Tracking where the conversation is being advanced, since it can happen at
any place in the sketch.

— Sketching, while can be more informative than text, is tricker to conform to
smaller mobile screen sizes.

— Ideally it should not be limited to two dimensions only, but multi-
dimensional sketching poses hard UI challenges.

~~~
saizai
Tracking: if you're asking a question or otherwise anticipating where the
other will add, there are relatively few places to look.

Also, we use different colors per author in multi-author utterances, which
makes it easy to spot another's writing.

Of course, unless you have an animated or history-preserving medium (which we
assume we don't), then reconstructing the order of conversation might be
difficult. That is entirely in keeping with our sense of what is "natural" to
a non-linear language. The order in which something was written is temporal,
and everything temporal is linear, so it's disfavored semantically &
grammatically.

We prefer to challenge concepts like "conversation" at the root on such
issues, rather than try to adapt UNLWS to afford them.

Sketching: we assume an infinite plane writing canvas. In practice, this means
eg that one can use scaling to fit anything anywhere. However, we generally do
not make use of images, unless it's purely quotative.

We do have e.g. graphs grammaticalized, though (inspired by Tufte's
_sparklines_ , but with a few more affordances from not being in a linear
embedding.)

3d+: We considered that early on — and it's addressed in my essays on language
design — but we rejected it as too under-constrained and difficult to work
with in practice.

However, I've recently been thinking about a UNLWS-ish _tactile_ 2.5D concept,
which would use texture and a shallow height dimension — like a topographic
map, not like an ants' nest. That's still in early conceptual stage, and not
documented anywhere except a couple posts on CONLANG-L.

~~~
strogonoff
> we rejected it as too under-constrained and difficult to work with in
> practice

I’m imagining a conversation as a space containing multiple regular UNLWS
planes, intersecting at certain [binding?] points.

Such an approach would ideally leave dimensionality to the medium, language
itself could remain under same constraints as before.

A conversation plane would be viewed in 2D, but certain points could indicate
connections outside of current plane. For such a point, viewer can pull up a
projection that shows connecting conversation planes in some way (possibly 3D
or pseudo-3D).

Of course, there are some technical challenges in implementing a medium that
works this way, and it’s unclear how groundbreaking or useful it would be in
practice (after all, all conversation planes should be possible to represent
as areas on one larger plane, just with longer connecting lines).

~~~
saizai
I have two concerns with that, above the (major) technical challenges: 1\. we
wanted this to be writable using colored pens 2\. if we add a dimension, we
must add it for real.

#2 is to me the vastly harder problem. Just like in UNLWS, we _always_ have to
challenge our own assumptions in order to get a sense for what would be
"native to" a two-dimensional written langauge, we'd have to do the same for
3D (or 2.5D). Merely slapping 2D planes together with some links would not
come anywhere even close to a robust use of the medium, just like merely
having English sentences branch off from each other isn't anywhere close to a
robust use of two-dimensionality.

Fully 2D language is already an extremely conceptually challenging problem, at
least to me. Hardly anyone has even tried. There are fundamental challenges,
like "how do you tell a joke when you don't control the ordering".

I don't think anyone is currently able to do 3D in a way that would truly
serve the medium - and the medium would need to be much better defined, since
humans' inability to actually see anything 3D instantaneously (we see 2D with
an imputed distance and assumptions about what the rest looks like) implies
that there must be interaction-in-time of some sort (like, at minimum, moving
your head or the object in order to see the whole thing). That's going to be
very specific to the medium. Are we talking about arbitrary 3D disconnected
polytopes, ants' nest casts, convex hulls, computer-manipulated 2D, VR
goggles, ...? Those all have radically different affordances.

Simultaneously, it would trivialize problems in 2D that we have to deal with.
E.g. in 3D, there's no circuit wire-crossing problem, whereas in 2D, Borromean
rings e.g. have unavoidable collisions. It would be cheating to use 3D in some
shallow way to get rid of that issue, without also dealing with 3D's own
problems.

Design constraints are a _good_ thing.

------
chronikewok
This reminds me of the film Arrival and relates to the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis
[1]regarding how language affects our perception and cognition. It's certainly
a very interesting design (there's a hieroglyphic electrical circuit quality
to it), but it wasn't clear what we can infer or gain from this non-linear
form of writing. I feel like non-linear thinking is naturally how our brains
work (or has more potential to work), but not how we have been trained to
decode symbols, so it'd be interesting to see how this type of language might
alter our cognition.

Would this help us look at ideas more holistically? Would this help us be more
sensitive to relationships rather than just the objects? Could this open up
new patterns of thinking? Lot's of interesting questions.

[1]
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Linguistic_relativity](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Linguistic_relativity)

~~~
ooobit2
I believe that understanding relationships between units (objects, people,
etc.) explains high intelligence, especially in autism, more than most average
thinkers assume. People tend to fixate on the unit, and presume a relationship
apropos between units. So, if we give core focus to memorizing the
relationship _then_ the unit, we may actually reinforce the neural pathways
for both units and the abstraction between them without additional repetition.

My long-term memory is more efficient when I learn something from multiple
angles. So, I don't look at basic algebra and just think, "X and Y are
placeholders for numbers." I also think, "X can contain the value Y expressed
as X=!Y." and "X can be a function of X expressed as X=X(X++)." and so on.
This kind of ad-hoc modeling is about testing and defining the context of a
relationship between units. And in that respect, I can say, anecdotally, that
I consume information quickly and rarely have recall errors.

~~~
saeranv
Fascinating. Can you explain this: "X can be a function of X expressed as
X=X(X++)."

This is my (incorrect) attempt to make sense of the equation: X++ = X + 1 (?)
X() What does this mean? How can X be a function?

------
restalis
After going through the phase of admiring this new and intellectually
stimulating thing, I went on with an exercise of imagination about how it
would look like for a society to have evolved somehow into using this at
large. Each new word (or at least morpheme) has to have its own
signature/ideogram that has to be learned and remembered. For a lexicon of any
practical use that would mean thousands of ideograms. That feels quite a
burden. An improved solution that I'm able to imagine just now may be to have
ideograms only for abstract relations (like for prepositions) and keep
"ordinary" words (as the nouns and verbs, at least) formed by a much smaller
group of simpler constructs, like we do with alphabet letters?

Good stuff, nevertheless.

~~~
andrewflnr
Ideograms clearly _can_ work, and pretty dang well, as demonstrated by ancient
China. Some phonetic representation would be nice too. Either way, you'd
likely see common structures evolving into ideograms. Very interesting.

~~~
saizai
FWIW, we deliberately decided to have no phonetic representation at all, to
avoid any linearizing influence.

Yes, it would need a large number of glyphs. Not so many as speculated above,
though — e.g. we have one glyph that covers communicate, say, tell, hear,
speech (all senses), etc. (with some mix-ins for sensory modality); another
one that covers give, receive, gift, sell, etc.

Linear languages with European structure need way more words, because the
syntax isn't very able to represent the shared concept between these with a
single word. We can.

And yes, common structures do get turned into glyphs, or reduced forms.

We also have a barely-explored concept about glyphs being fractal (i.e. if you
zoom in, it's actually the shape of an underlying utterance whose syntax
"draws" the higher order glyph). This presumably would be a sort of literary
or poetic form. (I have composed one very simple example.¹)

¹ [https://s.ai/poetry/distant_love](https://s.ai/poetry/distant_love)

~~~
plutonorm
I love this idea so much that I would like to learn the language. Is there a
group or something I could join? Does anyone want to make a group? I'm sure we
could work something out with an online drawing app.

The possiblity of getting ideas out of my head and onto paper without having
to linearise everything is very exciting.

~~~
saizai
There is now: [https://join.slack.com/t/ulws/shared_invite/zt-
ewevpfmf-s1r3...](https://join.slack.com/t/ulws/shared_invite/zt-
ewevpfmf-s1r3lzEX02QMgglC3ECkZw)

------
saizai
I'm Sai, co-creator of UNLWS. AMA(relevant).

~~~
brian_cloutier
Are you still working on it, is there a community I could join to try having a
conversation using it?

~~~
saizai
Yes, we're still working on it. (E.g. we were discussing the concept "only" a
couple days ago.)

Right now, our main blocker is technical: we want a JavaScript based method
for rendering it from a DSL, because making, loading, & maintaining images in
the doc is a huge pain.

We've provisionally decided on using Cytoscape.js, but it needs some
extensions to work for us — e.g. cubic splines (it only has quadratic) and
relative angles of attachment for edges to nodes. My areas of expertise are
mainly back end web dev & analytics, and Alex's are mainly academic math &
coding competitions, so JS isn't particularly easy for either of us.

We'd appreciate help with this. It's on my GitHub¹; get in contact personally²
if interested.

As for a speaker community, we don't have one currently, though over the years
we've had around 3-4 people express interest. We never really considered it
something that others would want to do (though we've always been quite
interested in getting feedback, suggestions, etc., and we'd be willing to
engage in in-UNLWS dialogue).

However, this seems like roughly the critical mass needed for such a
community, so I'll try to set one up. Please contact me directly², and LMK any
platform preferences.

¹ [https://github.com/saizai](https://github.com/saizai) across a couple
recent repos

² [https://s.ai/contact](https://s.ai/contact)

------
KhoomeiK
Reminds me of this [1] blog post which was on HN a while ago about Yukaghir's
(a paleosiberian group) semasiographic writing system.

Also related is this conlang that was posted to r/conlangs maybe a couple
years ago that I can't seem to find now. The idea was that you can represent
elementary ideas with shapes and then connect those shapes in a non-linear
fashion and add slight variations to specify certain semantic properties,
allowing there to be numerous different "correct" readings.

Also, shameless plug of my blog [2] where I've been fleshing out a similar
idea (albeit not focused on writing) for the past few months. It takes
inspiration from Discourse Representation Theory and semantic graphs.

Edit: Just read about halfway through and the similarities between your
conlang and mine are striking. I'd go so far as to say that yours is just a
really interesting visual representation of mine.

[1] [http://historyview.blogspot.com/2011/10/yukaghir-girl-
writes...](http://historyview.blogspot.com/2011/10/yukaghir-girl-writes-love-
letter.html)

[2] [https://rpandey.tech/blog](https://rpandey.tech/blog)

------
nathell
Somewhat related: Sylabitsa, a Hangul-style syllabary for Polish. Described in
its current rendition in [1], but previous ideas of the author included
vertically stacking syllables, thus making the alphabet potentially infinite
and non-linear.

[1]:
[https://sites.google.com/site/qrczakmk/sylabitsa](https://sites.google.com/site/qrczakmk/sylabitsa)

------
ShorsHammer
Completely Offtopic: How does one get a single letter domain name?

Especially with a premium tld, and even moreso for a personal blog it just
seems unreal.

~~~
saizai
Anguilla permits them. I had to buy off a squatter.

But Sai is literally my full name (I'm mononymous), at the time it was
affordable to buy off the squatter, and the per year registration fee isn't
too high. So I think it's certainly been worth it.

~~~
ShorsHammer
That's awesome, saw in the bio that it was actually your name too which was
even cooler. I spent some time going through {X}.ai domains, surprised many
are actually on sale.

Find it impressive because I always feel as though I missed out on the golden
era of short domains long ago and that's clearly not the case.

Hopefully you hold onto that mate, it seems like a good patch of digital land
:)

Really enjoyed reading through your other stuff too. It's great to see
personal sites not so focused on one thing only.

~~~
saizai
Thanks! People are complex. It's my personal site, not a topical one, so it
likewise has on it basically whatever I think would be interesting to put up.
;)

I'd welcome any feedback you have on the rest. Feel free to contact me
directly.

------
gardenfelder
They have a bogus link
[http://eaworld.conlang.org/relays/relay19/relay19.php?ring=3...](http://eaworld.conlang.org/relays/relay19/relay19.php?ring=3&torch=04&ringlish=N&tlit=n&torchlish=y&reverse=n)
which I am not able to decipher.

~~~
saizai
Thanks for reporting the broken link. Alex has fixed it in the document. The
content is now at
[https://000024.org/conlang/relay19/index.html](https://000024.org/conlang/relay19/index.html)

Google "conlang relay" to learn more about the context for which this was
made.

------
anonytrary
Holy shit. I'm blown away by this. Imagine the ability to use these as
training inputs for language processing. Just add one more representation to
the bucket of things to train models on. Very fascinating. Favoriting this.

~~~
saizai
Could you elaborate? How do you see this as relating to NLP?

FWIW, I very strongly recommend Rick Morneau's monograph _Lexical semantics of
a machine translation interlingua_ ¹. It was a major influence for me, and is
squarely intended for NLP model-internal usage.

¹
[http://www.rickmor.x10.mx/lexical_semantics.html](http://www.rickmor.x10.mx/lexical_semantics.html)

------
dfischer
Interesting similarities between signals and Sumerian cuneiform.

1\.
[https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/b/b9/72_Goeta...](https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/b/b9/72_Goeta_sigils.png)

2\.
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cuneiform#/media/File:Sumero-A...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cuneiform#/media/File:Sumero-
Akkadian_cuneiform_syllabary.jpg)

------
codezero
I love that “eat” looks like Pac-Man.

~~~
saizai
Actually IIRC, that was our inspiration for it. ;)

------
mickdarling
Doesn’t this just boil down to “GOTO may be useful”?

------
pham_nuwen
This could be utterly beautiful if fused with Dialogue Mapping:

[http://www.cleverworkarounds.com/2009/09/10/the-practice-
of-...](http://www.cleverworkarounds.com/2009/09/10/the-practice-of-dialogue-
mapping-part-1/)

------
foobar_
Programming is a non linear writing system. Now that I think of it ... if you
replace functions names with logograms you get a top to down writing system of
sorts.

~~~
saizai
Not really. Programming is very linear in all forms I know¹.

1\. There's a start point. UNLWS has none.

2\. There's a mandatory canonical traversal order of the text (the compiled
instruction pointer, at base). UNLWS has none.

3\. Structurally — i.e. even ignoring execution — it's mainly a tree, not a
graph (parent class > child class > instance > function, e.g.). There are some
parts that are directed graphs, like mix-ins and some RDBs. True multigraph
structure is fairly rare. UNLWS is pervasively a fully connected multigraph
with some directed edges (like irrealis).

…

Programming is, however, similar to UNLWS in that both are isomorphic to
predicate calculus (e.g. functions, like UNLWS glyphs, are n-ary predicates).
I think that's what you're probably catching on.

It is an important feature… but I think you're missing the more essential
nature of non-linearity.

(It took me several years to grasp enough to start making UNLWS, so don't feel
too chastised. It's a very difficult concept. :p)

I believe that complex circuits (as in wiring) and flowcharts _do_ have the
non-linear nature, though. Perhaps it'd help to think of those?

¹ I don't know functional programming or constraint satisfaction systems. It's
possible those are different.

~~~
smabie
The actor model is non-linear. Reading the code gives you almost no clue on
the order of execution.

~~~
saizai
That seems to me to be more like multithreaded linear than non-linear per se.

There are multiple linear components, and it's not obvious how they emergently
interact — but they don't quite have the interconnectedness and non-
directedness properties.

(I think that it's impossible for anything that's time-embedded to really be
non-linear, short of time travel, since time is so fundamentally a directed
linear vector.)

It's certainly a related concept, and these are aspects of non-linearity, but
to my view it lacks some essential Buddha-nature of the full thing.

