
Generative Bad Handwriting - atulvi
https://avinayak.github.io/programming/art/2020/09/18/p5-strokes.html
======
codetrotter
> 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.

~~~
082349872349872
Eighteenth century generative philosophy:
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Engine](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Engine)

Fourteenth century:
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ramon_Llull#Mechanical_aspect](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ramon_Llull#Mechanical_aspect)

Ninth century BC:
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/I_Ching](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/I_Ching)

Also: "abstract comics"

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

------
gumby
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.

~~~
pickledish
A link to this poem, since I was curious:

[http://www.yourdailypoem.com/listpoem.jsp?poem_id=648](http://www.yourdailypoem.com/listpoem.jsp?poem_id=648)

------
harikb
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 :)

------
kemonocode
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.

~~~
082349872349872
Compare "3\. THE SERIES OF APPROXIMATIONS TO ENGLISH" in
[http://people.math.harvard.edu/~ctm/home/text/others/shannon...](http://people.math.harvard.edu/~ctm/home/text/others/shannon/entropy/entropy.pdf)
(1948)

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12579661](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12579661)

------
qubex
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](https://www.contextfreeart.org/gallery/view.php?id=945)

------
NKosmatos
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 :-)

~~~
BrandoElFollito
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)

------
Jaruzel
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.

------
TheUndead96
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.

~~~
082349872349872
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](https://vistapointe.net/images/minimum-2.jpg)

and too much in others:

[https://www.google.com/search?q=ambigrams&tbm=isch](https://www.google.com/search?q=ambigrams&tbm=isch)

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

------
manintheman
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

