Dot dot arrow bracket greater-than love
From boingboing comes an interesting story of a new novel by Chinese author Hu Wenliang. It has five sections, and each section is entirely composed of punctuation. The challenge to readers from the author is to decode his punctuation-only novel into a “touching love story.” Interested? How about after you find out that this is the entire novel:
：？
：！
“‘……’”
（、）·《，》
；——
More details at this China daily article. From the author himself:
I have my own answer, which is around 100 Chinese characters. The interpretation should cover the description of characters and the plot of the story, I will reward someone who can guess 80 percent the hidden story correct.
There have been some takers, but no one has done the job to his satisfaction yet. And what about language experts? Well:
“Using 14 punctuations to make a story is pretty like a farce,” said Chen Xiaoming, professor of the Department of Chinese Language from the prestigious Peking University. “The use of punctuations has very clear rules, for instance, a full stop is used at the end of a statement or the end of imperative sentences; question mark is placed a the end of request. Punctuations are subordinates of words, which cannot be used alone as a story,” he explained.
I especially like the insertion of prestigious in the introduction of the “language expert.” As for whether it’s a farce or not, I can’t say. I certainly hope the author has a good explanation for the content of the novel, and would be disappointed to find out that it’s some sort of “gotcha” gimmick. And as for what I think it is… well, here’s my translation:
A: Puzzling…I’m not sure if you love me. B: I just don’t know what to say. A: Don’t give me the silent treatment. B: You mean you can’t tell from my beady eyes, small nose, and facial tattoos? C: pounds squeaky hammer down on A and B Quiet! I’m trying to decode this novel.
I know, it’s not that impressive. It’s much better in the original Chinese.
(hopefully someone got the emote refs…)
[update: I may be been mistaken - the "14 punctuations" may be types, not tokens, and so the above five lines may actually be sections, which I mistook as a poor translation of "lines" or something (there are some other interesting non-native English elements in the China Daily article). If so, the actual piece may be considerably longer. Some readers, however, have interepreted the article as I originally did, with the "14 punctuations" being tokens, not types. But with the "type" interpretation, the task then seems much morer realistic. And since the author is willing to accept 80% correctness, it seems likely that this is not a full encryption. If it were, a full 100% wouldn't be totally unreasonable.]
[update (07.18): article and informative comments up at No-sword.]
Comments(2)
I figured they were five 20%-of-a-novel-sized sections encoded very, very efficiently. (So efficiently that decoding them becomes 99% guesswork!) Your interpretation is probably the best I’ve seen so far, mind you.
I was intrigued to learn that, for example, ( ) counts as a single “punctuation” rather than two.
Ah, interesting. Now it makes much more sense, becaue I kept counting more than 14. Still, does that mean that all the paired braces match in the novel? That seems boring, though it does provide structure that might made the decoding easier.
I had the fun idea that each page might be filled with punctuation that, when converted to the correct type of stroke, became one (or more) characters. That would be fun, though I’m not sure exactly how obvious that would be… And again, it allows for a 100% decoding, which doesn’t make sense given the author’s comments.