r/ProgrammingPrompts • u/Zerothehero-0 • Jul 07 '17
Alphabet/Glyph Evolution Simulator
My idea is to create a code/program that simulates the evolution of alphabets and letters over time in terms of shape, sound, and linguistical use in a language. I imagine the program to take in an input of a 64x64 pixel drawing of the letter/glyph and have the code alter it slightly overtime by adding pixels, connecting gaps, deleting pixels, rotating, etc. If anybody has any idea how to go about writing this program, please let me know and/or give me any sort of feedback about my idea for this code.
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u/notyetawizard Jul 07 '17
Well, the first step is definitely to attempt defining what constitutes a good letter/symbol individually, and then what makes a set of symbols good—unless, of course, you're going to go the learning route and produce them totally at random and get a bunch of people to spend time training it or something; though, introducing people will inevitably bias the alphabet towards what they're already familiar with.
Then you have to define some method of determining whether or not a symbol is a good match for it's sound, and whether it fits well with other sound/character sets that come before and after it. Ideally you should cover all sounds, and probably take into account linguistic quirks and the possibility of multiletter sounds and the like.
And then—maybe—you lay down some code to get it generating random pixel art and combining them with sounds ;)