Chu Bong-Foo
Encyclopedia
Chu Bong-Foo is the inventor of the Cangjie method
Cangjie method
The Cangjie input method is a system by which Chinese characters may be entered into a computer by means of a standard keyboard...

, 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.
Chu spent his childhood in Taiwan, but worked at Brazil
Brazil
Brazil , officially the Federative Republic of Brazil , is the largest country in South America. It is the world's fifth largest country, both by geographical area and by population with over 192 million people...

, United States
United States
The United States of America is a federal constitutional republic comprising fifty states and a federal district...

, Taiwan, Shenzhen
Shenzhen
Shenzhen is a major city in the south of Southern China's Guangdong Province, situated immediately north of Hong Kong. The area became China's first—and one of the most successful—Special Economic Zones...

 and Macau
Macau
Macau , also spelled Macao , is, along with Hong Kong, one of the two special administrative regions of the People's Republic of China...

.

History

Chu was born in 1937 in Huanggang, Hubei
Huanggang, Hubei
Huanggang City is a major municipality in eastern Hubei Province, China. It is situated to the north of the middle reaches of the Yangtze River and is bounded in the north by the Dabie Shan mountain range....

 to father Chu Wan-Yin , also called Chu Huai-bing. His family led a wandering life during the turbulent days of mainland China
Mainland China
Mainland China, the Chinese mainland or simply the mainland, is a geopolitical term that refers to the area under the jurisdiction of the People's Republic of China . According to the Taipei-based Mainland Affairs Council, the term excludes the PRC Special Administrative Regions of Hong Kong and...

, and they finally settled down in Taiwan
Taiwan
Taiwan , also known, especially in the past, as Formosa , is the largest island of the same-named island group of East Asia in the western Pacific Ocean and located off the southeastern coast of mainland China. The island forms over 99% of the current territory of the Republic of China following...

. 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 countryside, and developed a sense of mission for rural development and cultural improvement. Finding teaching not to his taste, he went to Brazil
Brazil
Brazil , officially the Federative Republic of Brazil , is the largest country in South America. It is the world's fifth largest country, both by geographical area and by population with over 192 million people...

 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
Hippie
The hippie subculture was originally a youth movement that arose in the United States during the mid-1960s and spread to other countries around the world. The etymology of the term 'hippie' is from hipster, and was initially used to describe beatniks who had moved into San Francisco's...

 lifestyle and studied at a local conservatory
Music school
The term music school refers to an educational institution specialized in the study, training and research of music.Different terms refer to this concept such as school of music, music academy, music faculty, college of music, music department or conservatory.Music instruction can be provided...

.

Cangjie

However, his work on Cangjie did not begin until he worked at "CULTURAL ABRIL", a publishing
Publishing
Publishing is the process of production and dissemination of literature or information—the activity of making information available to the general public...

 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 was much slower than in 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 radical
Radical (Chinese character)
A Chinese radical is a component of a Chinese character. The term may variously refer to the original semantic element of a character, or to any semantic element, or, loosely, to any element whatever its origin or purpose...

s or its Pinyin
Pinyin
Pinyin is the official system to transcribe Chinese characters into the Roman alphabet in China, Malaysia, Singapore and Taiwan. It is also often used to teach Mandarin Chinese and spell Chinese names in foreign publications and used as an input method to enter Chinese characters into...

 (or romanization) give only ambiguous results. On the other hand, while Chinese script has no alphabet
Alphabet
An alphabet is a standard set of letters—basic written symbols or graphemes—each of which represents a phoneme in a spoken language, either as it exists now or as it was in the past. There are other systems, such as logographies, in which each character represents a word, morpheme, or semantic...

, most characters are compounds of a common set of components. Chu assumed that it was 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 for general use but did however prove the possibility of encoding Chinese in this way.

Chu then enlisted more help, including
that of Shen Honglian (沈紅蓮) from the Department of Chinese Literature, National Taiwan University
National Taiwan University
National Taiwan University is a national co-educational university located in Taipei, Republic of China . In Taiwan, it is colloquially known as "Táidà" . Its main campus is set upon 1,086,167 square meters in Taipei's Da'an District. In addition, the university has 6 other campuses in Taiwan,...

. At the same time, Chu also learned about An Wang
An Wang
Dr. An Wang was a Chinese American computer engineer and inventor, and co-founder of computer company Wang Laboratories.-Early life and career:...

's encoding scheme. On one hand, Wang's scheme further confirmed the feasibility of the encoding approach. On the other hand, it inspired Chu to think that his encoding scheme should not only be convenient for looking up a character, it should also take the form of the characters into account to make it possible to compose (draw) the character from a code. Chu assumed this could 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 component 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.

1978, he implemented the method with computer technology, making it a Chinese input methods for computers
Chinese input methods for computers
Hundreds of Chinese input methods are available for entry of Chinese characters into computers, but most keyboard-based methods rely on either pinyin phonetic readings or root shapes in Chinese characters...

. The ROC
Republic of China
The Republic of China , commonly known as Taiwan , is a unitary sovereign state located in East Asia. Originally based in mainland China, the Republic of China currently governs the island of Taiwan , which forms over 99% of its current territory, as well as Penghu, Kinmen, Matsu and other minor...

 Defence Minister Chiang Wei-kuo
Chiang Wei-kuo
Chiang Wei-kuo was an adopted son of President Chiang Kai-shek, adoptive brother of President Chiang Ching-kuo, and an important figure in the Kuomintang . His courtesy names were Jianhao and Niantang .- Early life :...

 gave the input method the name "Cangjie". Chu put Cangjie method in the public domain
Public domain
Works are in the public domain if the intellectual property rights have expired, if the intellectual property rights are forfeited, or if they are not covered by intellectual property rights at all...

 in a bold effort to promote Chinese computing, essentially giving 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 adaptations of Chu's methods have also appeared.

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

"Chinese computer"

During the development of Cangjie method, Chu found that his invention is not only an input method, but also a character encoding
Character encoding
A character encoding system consists of a code that pairs each character from a given repertoire with something else, such as a sequence of natural numbers, octets or electrical pulses, in order to facilitate the transmission of data through telecommunication networks or storage of text in...

 method for computing systems. Unlike An Wang
An Wang
Dr. An Wang was a Chinese American computer engineer and inventor, and co-founder of computer company Wang Laboratories.-Early life and career:...

's encoding method of the time, or later methods such as Big5
Big5
Big-5 or Big5 is a character encoding method used in Taiwan, Hong Kong, and Macau for Traditional Chinese characters.Mainland China, which uses Simplified Chinese Characters, uses the GB instead.- Organization :...

 and Unicode
Unicode
Unicode is a computing industry standard for the consistent encoding, representation and handling of text expressed in most of the world's writing systems...

, Cangjie method does not sort characters by their usage frequency, stroke count, or radical, but is based on their composition aspect and inspired by the "pictophonetic compounds" principle of Chinese.

Chu therefore began to develop 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 a character encoding is very useful, since it 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 a variety of Chinese information technology: smart dictionary; operating system and application software; programming language; hardware architecture of PC and embedded systems; and even strong artificial intelligence
Artificial intelligence
Artificial intelligence is the intelligence of machines and the branch of computer science that aims to create it. AI textbooks define the field as "the study and design of intelligent agents" where an intelligent agent is a system that perceives its environment and takes actions that maximize its...

.

In 1979, he invented a character generator
Character generator
A character generator, often abbreviated as CG, is a device or software that produces static or animated text for keying into a video stream. Modern character generators are computer-based, and can generate graphics as well as text...

 program, which takes Cangjie encoded data and dynamically generates Chinese characters for screen display. In the same year, Chu's team collaborated with the Acer
Acer (company)
Acer Incorporated is a multinational information technology and electronics corporation headquartered in Xizhi, New Taipei City, Taiwan. Acer's products include desktop and laptop PCs, tablet computers, servers, storage devices, displays, smartphones and peripherals...

 company, and the program became incorporated in the firmware of a "Chinese computer". Later the generator was also used in the "Cangjie controller board", which would enable an Apple II
Apple II
The Apple II is an 8-bit home computer, one of the first highly successful mass-produced microcomputer products, designed primarily by Steve Wozniak, manufactured by Apple Computer and introduced in 1977...

 computer to display Chinese characters in its hi-res graphics mode. A particular interesting "feature" of this early system was that it would also take and generate characters not explicitly included in the codepage, but implied by the rules of Canjie.

Since then, Chu has held particular views on Chinese information technology. His opinions on input method are aligned with others. He considered input using ordinary keyboards was then more feasible and compatible than speech
Speech recognition
Speech recognition converts spoken words to text. The term "voice recognition" is sometimes used to refer to recognition systems that must be trained to a particular speaker—as is the case for most desktop recognition software...

 and handwriting recognition
Handwriting recognition
Handwriting recognition is the ability of a computer to receive and interpret intelligible handwritten input from sources such as paper documents, photographs, touch-screens and other devices. The image of the written text may be sensed "off line" from a piece of paper by optical scanning or...

 or specialized keyboard. However, many of his other opinions have been at odds with consensus:
  • He uses a nationalist rhetoric on the subject.
  • He values written Classical Chinese
    Classical Chinese
    Classical Chinese or Literary Chinese is a traditional style of written Chinese based on the grammar and vocabulary of ancient Chinese, making it different from any modern spoken form of Chinese...

     over various forms of Chinese, such as speech, Chinese spoken language, Simplified Chinese character
    Simplified Chinese character
    Simplified Chinese characters are standardized Chinese characters prescribed in the Xiandai Hanyu Tongyong Zibiao for use in Mainland China. Along with traditional Chinese characters, it is one of many standard character sets of the contemporary Chinese written language...

     and Pinyin
    Pinyin
    Pinyin is the official system to transcribe Chinese characters into the Roman alphabet in China, Malaysia, Singapore and Taiwan. It is also often used to teach Mandarin Chinese and spell Chinese names in foreign publications and used as an input method to enter Chinese characters into...

    . He also values it over many synthetic language
    Synthetic language
    In linguistic typology, a synthetic language is a language with a high morpheme-per-word ratio, as opposed to a low morpheme-per-word ratio in what is described as an isolating language...

    s 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
    Lookup table
    In computer science, a lookup table is a data structure, usually an array or associative array, often used to replace a runtime computation with a simpler array indexing operation. The savings in terms of processing time can be significant, since retrieving a value from memory is often faster than...

     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 programming languages, with their syntax and tokens based on (Classical) Chinese language, are necessary.


In early 1990s, when the Chinese version of Microsoft
Microsoft
Microsoft Corporation is an American public multinational corporation headquartered in Redmond, Washington, USA that develops, manufactures, licenses, and supports a wide range of products and services predominantly related to computing through its various product divisions...

 Windows 3.0
Windows 3.0
Windows 3.0, a graphical environment, is the third major release of Microsoft Windows, and was released on 22 May 1990. It became the first widely successful version of Windows and a rival to Apple Macintosh and the Commodore Amiga on the GUI front...

 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
Shenzhen
Shenzhen is a major city in the south of Southern China's Guangdong Province, situated immediately north of Hong Kong. The area became China's first—and one of the most successful—Special Economic Zones...

 with a group of developers and produced a software application for Chinese integration, in pinyin called "Juzhen", (hanzi
Chinese character
Chinese characters are logograms used in the writing of Chinese and Japanese , less frequently Korean , formerly Vietnamese , or other languages...

: 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: in Chu's engine, a font
Typeface
In typography, a typeface is the artistic representation or interpretation of characters; it is the way the type looks. Each type is designed and there are thousands of different typefaces in existence, with new ones being developed constantly....

 containing 13095 characters took up at most a megabyte
Megabyte
The megabyte is a multiple of the unit byte for digital information storage or transmission with two different values depending on context: bytes generally for computer memory; and one million bytes generally for computer storage. The IEEE Standards Board has decided that "Mega will mean 1 000...

 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
Macau
Macau , also spelled Macao , is, along with Hong Kong, one of the two special administrative regions of the People's Republic of China...

. In 1999, he was appointed vice chairman of Culturecom Corporation.

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
E-book device
An e-book reader is a portable electronic device that is designed primarily for the purpose of reading digital books and periodicals.An e-book reader is similar in form to a tablet computer. A tablet computer typically has a faster screen capable of higher refresh rates which makes them more...

 with several names such as 文昌, 蒼頡. The core of the device is "Culturecom 1610", a RISC
Reduced instruction set computer
Reduced instruction set computing, or RISC , is a CPU design strategy based on the insight that simplified instructions can provide higher performance if this simplicity enables much faster execution of each instruction. A computer based on this strategy is a reduced instruction set computer...

, System-on-a-chip
System-on-a-chip
A system on a chip or system on chip is an integrated circuit that integrates all components of a computer or other electronic system into a single chip. It may contain digital, analog, mixed-signal, and often radio-frequency functions—all on a single chip substrate...

 "Chinese CPU" that includes a character generator. The device also features a "Cholesterol" LCD, which saves electricity. The device, similar to India's Simputer
Simputer
The Simputer is a self-contained, open hardware Linux-based handheld computer, first released in 2002. Developed in, and primarily distributed within India, the product was envisioned as a low-cost alternative to personal computers...

, 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. In 2002, some details of the product were released to LGPL by the two parties. 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
Virtual cinematography
Virtual cinematography is an umbrella term used to describe cinematographic techniques performed in a computer graphics environment. This includes a wide variety of subjects like photographing real objects for the purpose of recreating them as three dimensional objects or algorithms for automated...

. 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
    I Ching
    The I Ching or "Yì Jīng" , also known as the Classic of Changes, Book of Changes and Zhouyi, is one of the oldest of the Chinese classic texts...

    's prediction
  • a strong artificial intelligence natural language interface named "Little Xin".

External links

  • Personal website
  • Mingzhu generator : 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
    Microsoft Macro Assembler
    The Microsoft Macro Assembler is an x86 assembler that uses the Intel syntax for Microsoft Windows. there was a version of the Microsoft Macro Assembler for 16-bit and 32-bit assembly sources, MASM, and a different one, ML64, for 64-bit sources only...

     and Link.
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