Chu Bong-Foo

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This is a Chinese name; the family name is Chu.

Chu Bong-Foo is the inventor of the Cangjie method, the most widely available Chinese input method. He is said to be the father of the modern Chinese computing, as his public domain input method, created in 1976, has sped up the computerization of Chinese society.

[edit] History

Chu was born in 1937 in Huanggang, Hubei to father Chu Wan-Yin (朱萬蔭), also called Chu Huai-bing (朱懷冰). His family led a wandering life during the turbulent days of mainland China, and they finally settled down in Taiwan. There he studied at a local high school. He was an imaginative teenager who also spent much time reading fictions, but so much so that it negatively affected his studies. Later he also became interested in cinema. After graduating from Taiwan Provincial Agriculture Institute and his military service, he taught briefly at an elementary school in Hualien. In this period he witnessed the poverty of contryside, and developed a sense of mission for rural development and cultural improvement. Finding teaching not to his taste, he went to Brazil instead to develop his career, only to find life more difficult. Over that period of time, he took up several jobs. It was also during these turbulent times that Chu flirted with the Hippie lifestyle and studied at a local conservatory. ^[1]

[edit] Cangjie

However, his work on Cangjie did not begin until he worked at "CULTURAL ABRIL", a publishing house in Brazil, in 1972. From then on, he would dedicate his life to revamp Chinese information technology. He saw for himself how the Brazilians could, in just one day, translate and publish foreign literature, while the Chinese took at least a year. The technology then, coupled with the complexities of the Chinese script, required a painstaking process of picking up type pieces from an enormous Chinese character set. Besides, publishers often encountered characters not included in their set. This meant that the printing of any information in Chinese is dozens times slower than other languages. 1973, he returned to Taiwan. He gathered a team to study an efficient method of looking up a character with 26 keys on the common keyboard.

Existing methods of looking up a Chinese character such as looking for its radicals or its Pinyin (or romanization) give only ambiguous results. On the other hand, while Chinese script has no alphabet, most characters are compounds of a common set of components. Chu assumed that it is possible to encode Chinese characters with a group of 'Chinese alphabets' which can be mapped on a common keyboard. After studying dictionary cut-outs and many tests, the team released a table of 8,000 encoded characters in 1976. This result was unsatisfactory and merely proved the possibility of encoding Chinese.

Chu then enlisted more helps, including that of Shen Honglian (沈紅蓮) from the Department of Chinese Literature, National Taiwan University. At the same time, Chu also learned about An Wang's encoding scheme. On one hand, Wang's scheme further confirms the feasibility of the encoding approach. On the other hand, it inspired Chu that his encoding scheme should not only be convenient for looking up a character. It should also take the composition of characters into account to make itself convenient for composing the character from a code. Chu assumed this can be achieved with the following three steps:

1. choosing adequate rules of decomposition of characters
2. choosing an adequate set of forms as the common components
3. encoding the common components (with "Chinese alphabets")

To achieve these steps, the team employed a principle similar to the "pictophonetic compounds" principle of Chinese. In 1977 the team released the first generation of the method that would later be named "Canjie". The team selected a set of less than 2,000 components to compose about 12,000 common characters. Each components is represented by a permutation of 1 to 3 of 26 "Chinese alphabets" (also called "radicals"). Each "alphabet" maps to a particular letter key on a standard QWERTY keyboard.^[2]

1978, he combined the method with computer to become a Chinese input methods for computers. The ROC Defence Minister Chiang Wei-kuo gave the input method the name "Cangjie". Chu put Cangjie method in the public domain in a grand effort to promote Chinese computing and essentially gave up his rights to any royalty. His contribution led many future Chinese systems come bundled with a free copy of the Cangjie input method, removing the greatest barrier to effective Chinese input systems. Since then, many adaptation of Chu's methods also appeared.

Over generations of upgrades, Chu's Cangjie includes more and more characters. The fifth generation released in 1985 includes 60,000 characters.

[edit] "Chinese computer"

During the development of Cangjie method, Chu found that his invention is not just an input method, but also an character encoding method for computer and more. Unlike An Wang's encoding method of the time, or later methods such as Big5 and Unicode, Cangjie method dose not sort characters by their usage frequency, stroke count, or radical, but based on their composition aspect and was inspired by the "pictophonetic compounds" principle of Chinese.

Chu therefore began to claim a theory (which he would later call "Chinese DNA", "Alphabets of Chinese Language", or "Chinese character gene" theory). The theory states that the forms selected by Chu are the "genes" of Chinese. Proper arrangement of these "genes" can provide all functions of the characters. Therefore Cangjie method as an character encoding is very useful for the system contains not only an ordered set of characters, but also precise references of shapes, pronunciations and semantics of the characters. Therefore the system is an efficient base for various Chinese information technologies: smart dictionary; operating system and application software; programming language; hardware architecture of PC and embedded systems; and even strong artificial intelligence.^[3][4]

1979, he invented a character generator program, which takes Cangjie encoded data and dynamically generates Chinese characters screen output. In the same year, Chu's team cooperated with Acer, and the program became a firmware of a "Chinese computer". Later the generator was also used in "Cangjie controller board", which would enable an Apple II computer to display Chinese under hi-res graphics mode. A particular interesting "feature" of this early system is that it would also take and generate characters not explicitly included in the codepage, but implied by the rulse of Canjie. ^[5]

Since then, Chu has been holding a special view on Chinese information technology. His opinions on input method are aligned with others. He considered input using common keyboard was then more feasible and compatible than speech and handwriting recognition or specialized keyboard. However, many of his other opinions have been at odd with the trend.

• He uses a nationalist rhetoric on the subject.
• He values written Classical Chinese over various forms of Chinese, such as speech, Chinese spoken language, Simplified Chinese character and Pinyin. He also values it over many synthetic languages and their writing systems in the world.
• On the encoding issue, he said that the proposed Big5 13,053 characters codepage too small and too fixed.
• On the display of Chinese, he believes that the job should be done by the "calculation" of processing unit of computer, while the use of lookup table and storage unit should be minimum.
• He believes that Chinese information technology should take second-mover advantage, and choose an alternative path from then established Western theories.
• He also believes that the technology should be rooted in levels as basic and economic as possible. Instead of providing Chinese access at OS and application level on standard PC platform, he believes it should be available in levels much lower using specialized firmware and hardware, which can be used in a wide variety of products. He also believes some programing languages with their sytax and tokens based on (Classical) Chinese language are necessary.^[2]

Demonstration of character generator Mingzhu's capability of generating the characters according to the codes. Non of the examples are included in Unicode. The first character is "[飠它]", which is for a kind of soup in Xuzhou. Other characters are never recorded. Mingzhu was modified from Juzhen.

In early 1990s, when the Microsoft Windows 3.0 Chinese version attempted to enter Taiwanese market, Chu and some partners competed with it and advocated for more independence of Chinese information technology. Chu worked in Shenzhen with a group of developers and produced a software application for Chinese integration, in pinyin called "Juzhen", (hanzi: 聚珍) stood up against this strong force. It was released to the public domain, and distributed through the Rexun magazine. Between Chu and the financially strong Microsoft, the odds were against the former. However, Chu's engine had the benefit of space: For a font containing 13095 characters, Chu's engine took up at most a megabyte each and fit snugly on a floppy disk as compared to the 3-5 megabytes required by competitors' products. This strong advantage of Chu's technology led a sizeable number of technology companies to initiate discussions with Chu for a transfer of technology rights. Soon after, Jinmei (金梅), Zangzhu (藏珠) and other budget font makers swamped the market, forcing prices down and ensuring that every user could afford original copies of Chinese typefaces.

After "Juzhen" system, Chu left Taiwan for Macau. In 1999, he was appointed vice chairman of Culturecom Corporation. ^[6]

[edit] Seven years with Culturecom

Since 1999, Chu became a vice chairman of Hong Kong- and Macau-based Culturecom Corporation, Chu's team has been cooperating with Culturalcom until 2006 when Culturecom terminated this partnership.

Several products and technology were developed respectively, and resulted a series of E-book device with several names such as 文昌, 蒼頡. The core of the device is "Culturecom 1610", a RISC, System-on-a-chip "Chinese CPU" that includes a character generator. The device also features a "Cholesterol" LCD, which saves electricity. The device, similar to India's Simputer, features simple architecture and low cost. Chu's team designed it as an affordable electronic textbook for poor rural population. They also wished it to be the platform of a rural wireless network project named "eTown". However, up to 2006, these ideals were not realized.^[7] In 2002, some details of the product were released to LGPL by the two parties.^[8] Although the device did not take-off as expected, its technologies were employed by some other companies in their products, such as Kolin's i-library.

During this period, Chu's team was also interested in Virtual cinematography. They have released several feature length animation films.

Chu also gave more elaboration on his "Chinese DNA" theory. Using this theory as basis, Chu's team claimed to be developing:

• a system capable of automatically creating a movie from a written script.
• a method of interpreting I Ching's prediction
• a strong artificial intelligence natural language interface named "Little Xin".

[edit] See also

• Chinese BASIC
• Culturecom
• Transmeta

[edit] Reference

1. ^ Chu Bong-Foo. 智慧之旅 [His autobiography]. Volume 1. 1999. Hong Kong:Culturecom. Online resource. (zh-tw)
2. ^ ^{a b} Chu Bong-Foo (1982-01-10). 中文電腦漫談 [Talking About Chinese Computer] (zh-tw). Retrieved on 2007-01-23.
3. ^ Culturecom. Chinese DNA.
4. ^ Chu Bong-Foo. 漢字基因(zh-tw). 2000.
5. ^ * Taipei: Chwa! Taiwan Inc. (全華科技圖書公司). 倉頡中文資訊碼 : 倉頡字母、部首、注音三用檢字對照 [The Cangjie Chinese information code : with indexes keyed by Cangjie radicals, Kangxi radicals, and zhuyin]. Publication number 023479. — This is the user manual of an early Cangjie system with a Cangjie controller card.
6. ^ Culturecom Group history page.
7. ^ Chu's team's schedule, 1999-2001. (zh-tw).
8. ^ some details of the e-book device

[edit] External links

• Personal website
• Mingzhu generator(zh-tw): Chu Bong Foo's page. Including the executable, sourcecode and instruction. Mingzhu is a Canjie character generator modified from Juzhen. It runs on MS Windows' "DOS PROMPT". It requires Microsoft Macro Assembler and Link.