Riding the wind of rebirth

"Principal Zhao and Mr. Xu have heard the saying that Western characters only need 26 letters, plus numbers and some symbols, to form an ASCII collection that can meet the basic needs of information systems, and build a distributed The keyboard, with more than 200 characters, can already meet the basic needs of Western information systems."

"As for our Chinese characters, the most commonly used character set is more than [-]. Therefore, the Chinese character system is far less simple than in the West. In the information age, it will be ruthlessly eliminated due to factors such as complex input and output and too large a font library."

"However, these people are pure frogs in the bottom of the well."

"They just saw these disadvantages, and without serious consideration, they took it for granted that they came to the wrong conclusion."

"They never thought about it at all. So many hieroglyphs are actually a huge intangible cultural wealth unique to our nation."

"A lot of people are talking about computer technology now. In fact, this term is not accurate. To be precise, it should be called information technology, and what we are experiencing now is an information technology revolution."

"Then what is information technology?" Zhou Zhi said with a smile: "In the final analysis, it is information-related technology, including information input, storage, processing, and output."

"An independent unit with these capabilities is called an information unit."

"And countless such units are interconnected to form a huge information network."

"In fact, each of us can be regarded as an information unit, and our society is an information network."

"From this level of understanding, who is the nation with the most advanced information technology in history? It is undoubtedly the Chinese nation. Because our thousands of years of history are very well recorded through words and languages."

"And as a carrier of information, which language can stand the longest test? There is no doubt that it is Chinese characters, which have been using the same structural system and application system since Oracle Bone Inscriptions until now."

"What does this mean? It means that our nation's Chinese character system has stood the test of time and is a very advanced and mature information system."

"So the information age will not only not be our disaster, but on the contrary, it will be our enormous opportunity."

"Any information has a concept of information volume, which is to use the shortest byte unit to express the richest and most accurate meaning."

"What language has the largest unit information capacity? There is no doubt that it is still Chinese."

"The veterans of the Unicode organization and Microsoft are sensible people. They know this concept, so they are very enthusiastic about seeking cooperation with us."

"Everything has two sides. The problem with Chinese characters is that there are many codes and difficult to master. The advantage of Chinese characters is that once mastered, the expression is simple, the amount of information is large, and the use is efficient."

"So when we look at the problem, we can't just look at the disadvantages and ignore the advantages."

"We have to admit that in terms of programming and mathematical foundation, the Western alphabet has its unique advantages, but when it comes to the advanced application layer, the advantages of the Chinese character system are highlighted."

"What makes everyone lose confidence is mainly the difficulty of inputting and outputting Chinese characters in the information system, and the fact that the font library takes up too much space, resulting in a shortage of resources in the information system."

"The biggest difference between us and those who look down on Chinese characters is that they think this problem has no solution, but we believe that this problem can be completely solved."

"First of all, the font library. It is true that the font library needs a lot of space, but we also need to see the rapid development of information technology."

"The capacity of today's storage devices is increasing exponentially over time, and soon we will see the emergence of storage devices with more than ten gigabytes, tens of hundreds of gigabytes, or even thousands of gigabytes."

"At that time, the space occupied by the font library can only be described as insignificant."

"The next step is the issue of input and output. The output is very simple. No matter whether it is a monitor or a printer, as long as you give it the correct instructions, the text output is no more complicated than the image."

"The key is input, and the difficulty of input can be understood after we think about it. This is caused by our insistence on using traditional ASCII distributed keyboards for Chinese character output."

"If we change the way, for example, if one day, the audio reading technology matures, can we abandon the traditional keyboard and use voice to input Chinese characters? At that time, the associative function of Chinese characters will become a major advantage of our input. .”

"Even if you don't talk about such an advanced method, even if you use a traditional keyboard, we have now come up with an extremely fast input method, which is the radical input method represented by Wangma."

"The fastest typer can type nearly [-] words per minute, which is already close to our normal speaking speed."

"We can even assert that the current situation is that through the radical input method, the input speed is no less than that of speaking, and because the input is performed through the radical in a special position, there are no uncommon characters that cannot be recognized. Will enter the question."

"And the situation in the future is: after the input method of the information system evolves to voice, and the use of the information system evolves to the application layer of competition, the unique advantages of the Chinese character system will be brought into full play."

"At that time, we will find that software that uses Chinese to communicate and transmit information will have far more vitality than software that uses other languages."

"With this understanding, we can realize that we are now laying a solid foundation, and we are determined to seek an international standard protocol that can accommodate all our Chinese character codes at the bottom of the protocol, and has multilingual scalability and global versatility. The presence."

"But will this be too ambitious?" Godfather seems to have done a lot of research this month, and has been able to ask some key questions: "Isn't it that our information industry is still catching up? And according to our usual The approach, the catch-up stage, is to first solve the problem of whether it is there, and then solve the problem of whether it is good or not, isn’t it?”

"Yes, godfather, what you said is also a routine approach." Zhou Zhi smiled and said: "Before Shu University proposed to cooperate with the alliance to develop the Unicode protocol, we also did the same, and even launched two font libraries in a row Version."

"However, there are huge engineering pitfalls in that way of working. If it is not considered carefully, it will cause huge troubles in the future." Zhou Zhi said: "We have encountered real-life examples in this regard."

"Really? Our information technology hasn't been developed for many years, right?" Godfather asked, "Could it be a problem with supercomputers?"

"No." Zhou Zhi knew some inside information in this regard, and he was naturally very proud: "I just want to tell you an exciting news. Our latest generation of supercomputers has also been developed, called 'Dawn', and it is now under construction at the Ministry of Science and Technology. For acceptance, the peak computing speed will be as high as [-] million operations per second."

"This..." The godfather was a little startled: "Didn't you just pass the national appraisal of the Yinhe full digital simulation type II computer? Why is there another dawn?"

"If it involves state secrets, don't talk nonsense, elbow!"