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Computer-friendly nactation methodology for variant/family symbols

Posted By: Matt Ryder
Date: Friday, 4 February 2011, at 12:31 p.m.

In Response To: Computer-friendly nactation methodology for variant/family symbols (Nack Ballard)

Nack wrote:

I'll concede you can't do everything. But if you believe it is prudent to limit computers to capital/lower-case and one character isn't always enough, I think you can do a lot better than a binary system. By just adding ONE extra character to H or h, you can generate well over a hundred additional H-family members. One such scheme, using only numerals and the first ten letters of the alphabet that generates an easy 60 members is

H, h, H3, H4, H5, H6, H7, H8, H9, H0, HA, HB, HC...HJ, Ha, Hb, Hc...Hj, h1, h2, h3... hA, hB, hC..., ha, hb, hc...

The problem with this approach is that it isn't at all easy to understand for human beings. For example, the 11th element ("HA") in your series might cause the reader to stop and ponder whether it's a single hit ("H") or an attacking blitz play ("A") that's intended. The virtue of the 'binary' approach lies in that it emphasises the intended action exclusively without any alphabet soup or numerals (which might distract the eye from the dice roll or action).

Also the binary method is easy to convert back to a number (both for humans familiar with binary, and for computers), so the depth is self-documenting. I would have to rote learn "Hc" is 23rd in your hierarchy, but with "hHhhh", I can just see it (and with practice, so might you).

In practice, you'd never need to encode anything beyond (say) Depth 7, which in the binary notation is a mere 3 digits. And in the vast majority of cases, you'd use the single digit nactation as usual. So I don't think compactness is an issue.

By the way, I agree fully that it's possible to devise a more compact system. For example, using Base 64 (and utilising a standard alphanumeric character-set) , you can represent 4095 symbols with two characters. But nobody would understand such a system. So compactness is not everything.

Matt R.

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