Riding the wind of rebirth

Hongsheng Building is a five-story modern building, which was built with donations from Hong Kong businessman Feng Hongsheng. On the other side, the digital center donated by IBM and Microsoft has become the most popular card of the computer department of Shu University.

The internal conditions of the building are very good. Central air-conditioning, which is still rare now, has been installed. Professors have their own modern and comfortable offices. The meeting rooms are equipped with high-fidelity microphones, projection screens, and TV and telephone equipment that are definitely at the forefront of the times. .

The host of the meeting was Mai Mingchuan, the head of the department, and the deputy was Director Wang of the Computing Center, Professor Li Hongjiang, the actual person in charge of the Hanwen Library, and a large group of science and engineering staff.

Only Gu Kailai and Zhou Zhi came from the Chinese Department.

There were also representatives from Microsoft and the Unicode Consortium.

"We're all acquaintances, so I won't talk too much. Zhou Zhi keeps his word and got into our Shu University with excellent grades. It will be more convenient to do things in the future." Mai Mingchuan said: "Let's welcome."

Everyone applauded.

"The task of this year's project is still very heavy." Mai Mingchuan said: "Moreover, the above and the Chinese Department have put forward new requirements for us, which requires a lot of energy. Today's meeting is mainly to discuss the packaging plan. And the focus of work in the next few months."

"We discussed this issue with Elbow." Gu Kailai said: "He put forward some new opinions on our current work."

"Oh?" Mai Mingchuan said, "Then why don't you just talk about it first?"

Zhou Zhi smiled and said: "Director Mai, Director Wang, Professor Li, all representatives, teachers, seniors, Director Gu and I have discussed the recent work on the construction of the Chinese character library, and we have read the process and progress project documents, and we know roughly what we are facing now. The problem."

"At that time, we divided the Hanwen large font into three levels. By July [-]st, we had completed the preparation of the first-level font, and now we can complete the final packaging of the first-level font, making it a part of the UNICODE code. "

"However, for the Han font library itself, the first-level font library only accounts for less than one-third of all Chinese characters, and the traditional characters in the font library currently only include the content of Taiwan Island, Hong Kong Island and Xindao. For Korean and Japanese The Chinese characters in it have not been accepted yet."

"In terms of fonts, the first-level font library only designed four types of Kai, Lishu, Song, Hei, and imitation Song. The seal script and Wei stele required by the Chinese Department have not yet begun to design."

"The most urgent contradiction now is that the D-day given to us by Microsoft is very urgent. The new font library must be delivered to Microsoft for use by WINNT. In the case of insufficient maturity of the product, we need to make some trade-offs, right?"

"There are still many problems." Li Hongjiang said: "But Elbow did see the main contradiction."

Zhou Zhi looked at the representative of Microsoft: "Mr. McLean, is there any extension plan for the launch of Microsoft's WINNT operating system? As far as I know, your operating system development has never been released on time according to the forecast."

Macklin didn't mind Zhou Zhi's outspokenness, and just shrugged his shoulders: "Although what you said is indeed true, I haven't received any notification from the headquarters yet."

"That is to say, there is no possibility of an extension for the delivery of our fonts?"

"I can fight for you," McLean said. "But for now, it's best to plan according to D-Day."

"Where's Professor Guojie?" Zhou Zhi asked Mai Mingchuan.

Li Guojie is in charge of SNIX, the Shuguang supercomputing operating system. They also have a need for a large font library, so they also have a team that is mainly responsible for verifying the results here. In fact, it is mainly free prostitution.

But Shu University has no choice, because in order to improve work efficiency, Zhou Zhi developed a character recognition system before. This system can convert scanned image characters into vector characters used by the system through a series of processes, which will undoubtedly save money. A lot of manual labor.

But there is a problem, that is, it consumes a lot of computing resources, and several machines of Shu University can't handle it. This part of the work has to be done by Suguang supercomputer.

Although ministries and supercomputing centers are quite suspected of being bullied by the big, after all, the design ideas and solutions are proposed by Shu University, and the supercomputing center is only responsible for calculating the results. One step closer to Armstrong's landing on the moon.

The Liberal Arts 863 project is also qualified to use supercomputers, Zhou Zhi can be regarded as tearing a gap between the arts and sciences.

"Shuguang is very powerful." When it comes to this, Mai Mingchuan has to be convinced: "Although the working time allocated to us is very little, the work of collecting characters has been completed. As far as we have collected more than 7 Chinese characters, all of them have been completed. Vectorized work."

"But Lao Li refuses to help with the code matching work, so we have to do the water mill ourselves."

"This is easy." Gu Kailai said, "Elbow compiled a set of computer algorithms based on my dictionary compilation method, which can automatically convert the Chinese characters in the "Chinese Dictionary" into codes according to the cataloging rules at that time."

"Really? It's so convenient to have this!" Mai Mingchuan was overjoyed: "I suggested to the school to make a special move on the elbows, but you just resisted it. If you want to work on the font library, you need talents with both literature and science!"

"It's just that this set of rules only deals with the [-] characters in the "Chinese Dictionary." Zhou Zhi said: "The first and second levels of Hanwen's big character library are [-] characters, and the third level and more than [-] characters still need to be combined. The root and stroke recognition function in the recognition system can match the pronunciation and strokes of the characters and match the vector characters with codes."

"How long did it take to complete the encoding of the "Chinese Dictionary"?"

"With the ready-made vector characters, collect the root, refer to the pronunciation, and assign the code." Zhou Zhi said with a smile: "In fact, the action is very fast, but it takes more time to debug bugs and deal with some doubtful characters that the system cannot determine. .”

"It took me two days to complete the feasibility experiment, and I can process a word in five seconds on a personal computer."

"That will save a lot of trouble!" Director Wang was surprised and delighted: "In this way, we will deliver the product on time before D day, and there should be no problem."

Mai Mingchuan now feels that Zhou Zhi is simply the mascot of the Hanwen large font project. He can make great progress in the project as soon as he comes. This kid likes to use his brain very much, and likes to develop various programs to replace tedious work. The font library, the root stroke analysis system, the recognition system, the conversion system, and the current automatic coding system often use unreasonable methods to open up precious paths for science students.

The people under Li Hongjiang's team are indeed aggrieved, and now they gradually understand the essence of this project, that is, it is indeed a liberal arts project, and the design ideas, concepts, and methodologies are all liberal arts. When it comes to the operation level, Only science students have room to intervene.

To put it bluntly, this is the difference between management and wage earners.