Compared with his elderly friends around him, Mr. Xie Tiyun's retired life is particularly fulfilling at the age of 78 because he immerses himself in things he likes every day. Not long ago, he received the national invention patent certificate for the "Character Shape and Frequency Segmentation Input Method" which he had researched for over a decade. This Chinese character input method is simple to learn, and its typing speed is faster than Wubi and Smart ABC. There is no need to memorize radicals or worry about standard Mandarin pronunciation; as long as one knows how to write Chinese characters, they can type.
Mr. Xie Tiyun, who retired from the original Zhejiang College of Traditional Chinese Medicine, is energetic and mentally sharp, and it’s hard to tell that he is close to eighty years old. What surprised me was that he didn't have much research on linguistics and almost knew nothing about computer knowledge. "Keep your brain active, do what interests you." This is a sentence from Xie Tiyun's own summary of his "38-word healthy life." After retirement, Xie Tiyun always wanted to find something to do, and later decided to study Chinese character lookup methods.
"A Xinhua Dictionary has ten thousand characters, each like a soldier. My task is to be a good division commander, understanding the appearance characteristics of each person, knowing their row and column number is enough," said Xie Tiyun with a military metaphor. However, he soon found out that the sorting work was not easy.
At first, Xie Tiyun used Arabic numerals 1, 2, 3, 4, 5 to replace horizontal, vertical, left-falling, right-falling, and turning strokes respectively, but problems arose as many characters had duplicate codes. One attempt after another failed, yet Xie Tiyun firmly believed that Chinese characters, which have been used for thousands of years, must have their own inherent rules, and it should be possible to find a lookup rule. After failing 22 consecutive times, he finally discovered a "Four-Code Character Lookup Method Based on Stroke Order."
He used six digits to represent six types of strokes, where 5 represents a horizontal start fold stroke, and 6 represents a non-horizontal start fold stroke. For Chinese characters with one to four strokes, the corresponding numbers are arranged according to the writing order, and those insufficient for four codes are padded with 0. For characters with more than four strokes, the sequence starts from the fifth stroke, such as "天" being 1134 and "领" being 4132. In 1997, this lookup method passed expert evaluation. In 2004, the "Chinese Character Pronunciation Quick Lookup Dictionary" was published, allowing people to quickly check the pronunciation of a Chinese character using this dictionary.
Based on this, Xie Tiyun completed the "Character Shape and Frequency Segmentation Input Method" in October 2006. He retained the original six digits representing six strokes and added 7, 8, 9, 0 to represent combinations of horizontal-vertical, dot-nap (right-falling), two-stroke continuity, and vertical with horizontal-starting fold strokes. When entering Chinese characters, input the numbers corresponding to the first and second strokes in the stroke order, and the third digit is the number corresponding to the last stroke. If there are fewer than three codes, pad with 0.
Xie Tiyun tested with the content of "Eight Honors and Eight Disgraces" as an example text. The result showed that the shape-frequency code single-character input required pressing keys 231 times, while Wubi and Smart ABC required 239 times and 320 times respectively. For phrase input, the three input methods required 173, 181, and 243 key presses respectively. It can be seen that the shape-frequency code is more efficient.
"Play music, chess, poetry, calligraphy, and painting, keep learning and thinking deeply, and keep the brain strong." These are two lines from Xie Tiyun's self-composed "Health Song." He believes that the elderly should be diligent in learning and good at thinking, which is also the secret to his vitality.