Radiolab - The Wubi Effect

Episode Date: August 14, 2020

When we think of China today, we think of a technological superpower. From Huawei and 5G to TikTok and viral social media, China is stride for stride with the United States in the world of computing. However, China’s technological renaissance almost didn’t happen. And for one very basic reason: The Chinese language, with its 70,000 plus characters, couldn’t fit on a keyboard.  Today, we tell the story of Professor Wang Yongmin, a hard headed computer programmer who solved this puzzle and laid the foundation for the China we know today. This episode was reported and produced by Simon Adler with reporting assistance from Yang Yang. Special thanks to Martin Howard. You can view his renowned collection of typewriters at: antiquetypewriters.com Support Radiolab today at Radiolab.org/donate. 

Hey, I'm Latif Nasser. This is Radio Lab. So I've been seeing headline after headline lately about how the U.S. is in a race. We need to compete with them. With China. We are in this high-tech competition with China. Over AI. AI arms race.

The country that leads in technology tends to lead the world. We need to win the race here in the United States. And this AI technological arms race, if you want to call it that, has been making me think about this episode that our C-I-Earthouse. senior producer Simon Adler made back in 2020. The story he tells is the story of another arms race between China and the U.S., one that took place in the 1970s and 80s over a piece of technology that we now completely take for granted.

Crucially, though, the story starts at a moment when China, instead of being the technological superpower that it is today, was about to be left behind. and the way that they caught up sort of set the table for this whole AI situation we are in right now. Simon did a great job with it. It is a super fun story to listen to.

So, without further ado, I give you the Wubei effect. Wait, you're listening. Okay. All right. Okay. All right. You're listening to Radio Lab.

Radio Lab. From W-N-Y-S-E-C-C-E-C-P-Y. Rewind. Hey, I'm Chad, I'm M-R-M-Rod. This is Radio Lab. To start things off today, a couple months ago. You want some govi? Too small?

In that magical, forgotten time before the coronavirus, our reporter, Simon Adler, somewhat mysteriously walked me a few blocks from our office. hand to a coffee shop. Okay, with our coffee purchased. Let's go stand in the corner where it's maybe a little less loud. Sort of a fancy one, exposed brick, bare Edison bulbs. So let's, let's gaze out upon the hipsters of Lower Manhattan. Do you intend to survey and count the number of laptops? Yeah, so how many laptops do you think are in here? Okay, starting from the left, we're going to circle around. We got one, two, three,

four, five, six. Two more on the bar? Two more on the bar. And they're all typing the same way. right? They're all using a quirky keyboard. Yeah, yes. And the reason he dragged me there, as I now know, now let's imagine we're in Shenzhen in a Chinese Starbucks. Was to point out a massive cultural difference hidden in plain sight, and to propose a bit of a reporting trip. Are you going to send somebody to Starbucks in Shenzhen? Well, that's my hope that I will be the one sent to a Starbucks in Shenzhen.

Well played, Adler. Now, you did not bite on that report. Nope. Plus, pretty soon thereafter, traveling to China became a lot more difficult, so... Okay, I'm in this big Starbucks shop here in Hong Kong. To play out this comparison I had in mind, instead, we hired and sent local reporter Yang Yang to scope it out for us. There are about 50 people here, maybe 30 laptops or tablets open.

Because, and here is where we get to the point, everyone in this Starbucks, you know, typing and writing and browsing on the internet. We're all using their keyboards in a different way. What do you mean? So using it in different ways in the way that they use the keyboard, or that the keyboard that they're using themselves are different? The physical keyboard is going to be the exact same thing. They're quirky keyboards, just like here in New York. Oh, okay. I didn't know that.

But, like, even if everybody in this Chinese Starbucks was really into dogs, it was a dog convention, and so they were all typing the word go, which is dog and Mandarin, no two people would be typing the word dog the same way. That's right. There could be 50 different ways that that keyboard is being used to type the Chinese language. This is Professor Tom Malaney. I'm professor of Chinese history at Stanford University. Okay. And this is the doorway into the grand mystery, it would seem. Yeah, because, I mean, in theory, there are an infinite number of different ways to type Chinese with the QWERTY keyboard.

I don't even know what that means. How is that possible? Well, it turns out that figuring out how to type in Chinese on a keyboard was one of the most complex engineering, linguistic, and conceptual puzzles of its time. It's a puzzle that threatened to erase an entire culture, nearly prevented China from becoming the technological superpower that it is today, and says a whole lot about where all of our communication is heading. All right, so before we get into why typing in Chinese is such a crazy, difficult problem to solve, Let me introduce you to one of the guys who actually set out to solve it.

Hello. Hello. Hello, is everybody here? Can you all hear us? Professor Wang Yongmin. Yes, Professor Wang is here. You can talk to him. My interpreter, fixer, and really co-reporter on the China side of this, Yang and I spoke with him a couple months back. Professor Wang, I think of you as sort of almost like the Chinese Steve Jobs.

Is that a fair way to think of you? He says that he's nowhere close to the wealth, Steve Jobs held. But in terms of his fame and reputation, yes, it's a fair comparison. Professor Wong was born in the 1940s in a small rural village. Growing up in this village, they had wheat and corn. His family farmed and his dad was also a carpenter, but it was a hard scrabble existence. His family was so poor that they couldn't afford any clothes for him. And, you know, because they were dirt poor, he understood at a very young.

young age that going to school was not a small thing. So he studied extremely hard. He said that from the first grade, all the way to university. Always the number one, okay? I am always the number one. And all that hard work paid off. He was selected to attend the University of Science and Technology of China, which is basically the equivalent to MIT.

And after graduating from college, he was assigned by the government to a research institute located in this remote district. And this wasn't just any research institute. It was a top secret, highly classified National Defense Research Institute. Even the locals didn't know what these people were doing there. And the top secret, highly classified work that was going on there was building computers, which in China wasn't just an engineering question. It was much deeper.

Keep in mind, this was the early 1970s. And everyone that was paying attention knew that computing was going to change the fabric of economy, warfare. Again, historian Tom Mulaney. Communication, everything. But at that time, China was just, just starting to enter this field and with lagging behind. I mean, the best estimates I could find say that around that time in the entire country, with a population of nearly a billion people, there were only 3,000 computers in use.

Why is that? Well, the simple reason is the Chinese language could not fit inside a computer. Meaning what? So in English, we put our word. words onto the page or the screen by shuffling around these 26 letters, right? Say them with me. A, B, C, each one representing a sound in the word. F, and the writing, in fact, tells you how to say the word.

B, I, G, big. Well, Chinese writing is completely different. The person character is placed next to a tree to convey the idea of resting. When you write in Chinese, you aren't writing down the sound. of the words so much as you're drawing a picture of each word. Three trees here are combined in the character for to mean a forest. This Chinese writing goes back at least 3,000 years, and in fact, some of the earliest known examples of it

were found on artifacts in Professor Wong's home province. And this writing system, these characters, grew out of an attempt to represent the actual things in the world. around us, water, stars, animals, actions, feelings. You can see a thing, see a picture, a long history in a Chinese character. So that today, there are more than 70,000 of these Chinese characters, each a unique visual representation of a word or an idea. And so the problem was, in the 1970s, computers had only a few bytes of memory, not even enough to store a single email message.

And so the available memory on most of these, on all of these computers, commercially available computers, couldn't even store the Chinese character set. Huh. Or display them on a screen or even print them. Like, again, back in the day, the 1970s, the way we're printing things is with dot matrix printers, right? Oh, I remember, yeah. Okay. Where these tiny needles strike the paper, composing letters out of a set of little dots. Paper pixels.

Paper pixels, exactly. It takes way more pixels to produce a Chinese character than it does to produce a letter of the Latin alphabet. And so inside these printers, those little needles weren't packed dentists. enough to tattoo a legible character onto the page. And if you take those pins and shrink them to get more paper pixels in a pinhead, well, what happens is they bend and break because they are not tuned metallurgically. They're not tuned to being that size. So it's not as if China could simply just buy these computers wholesale because the English language, the Latin alphabet, was in effect being baked into the architecture, in some cases, the very matter and materiality of these machines.

Whoa. That's funny. You know, we talk sometimes about algorithm bias, but I had never realized there was this huge cultural barrier in the basic hardware of the computer. Totally. And I mean, for China, this was seen as an existential threat. Consider the fact that because of these limitations into the 80s, they were forced to conduct and tabulate their senses with pencil and paper.

No shit. And so, by Lord, if China couldn't figure out a way to computerize Chinese or to Chinese-eyes computers, then it was going to be on the outside looking in. So this was the problem they were trying to solve at that top secret research institute. And the full magnitude of it, of this problem, really smacked Professor Wong in the face when he saw his first fully formed Western computer, which amazingly, because he'd been focused on such hyper-specific electrical problems didn't happen until about eight years into his research.

He remembers seeing it in a local printing shop. The first ever in real life. He was totally amazed. Yeah, I mean, that was incredible. But then, he says, he looked down at the keyboard, attached to the computer, and saw the Latin letters, and he thought, wait, how am I supposed to type 70,000 characters with just the 70 keys. Like, how are we going to fit the Chinese language on this thing? That would be the equivalent of trying to get all 26 letters of the Latin alphabet

onto less than one key. And as Professor Wong began looking into this, he found that the consensus at the time was it simply couldn't be done. At that time, there was a saying that Computers are the grave diggers of Chinese characters. Grave diggers. Oh, totally. People were making very loud calls for the absolute abolition of character-based writing.

You mean like throw out Chinese characters altogether? Yeah. It was like a doom day. Because of this very thing. It was a big part of it. And so tons of folks in the field of computing were arguing. We've got to replace. Chinese with Esperanto or with English or with something else

so that we can participate in global modernity. Behind the plans is the realization that China must modernize or starve. There was even a government body, the State Commission on Language Reform, that was looking into how to do this. However, Juan wasn't convinced. He thought there has to be a way to type in China.

and save the Chinese character. He called it destiny. He felt like it was fate. And he was convinced that if he couldn't do it, if he couldn't find a way to save the character. Chinese culture would be over with it too. Quote unquote. So I didn't know if I would succeed.

I didn't know if I would fail. There was no return regardless of life and death. Whoa. So, man. It's so dramatic. But it was really pressing for him, yeah. And for good reason. Because in fact, Chinese writing had nearly been wiped out once before.

And we're going to get into that right after this break. Okay, three, two, one. Hey, I'm Jan Aboumrod. And I'm Simon Adler. This is Radio Lab. And today, China's technological twist of fate. And before the break, Simon, you introduce us to a guy named Professor Wong, the man who was tasked with solving this problem, which it sounds like he took pretty seriously. Yeah, and for good reason, because the Chinese writing system had almost disappeared once before.

To set the scene, it's the 19th teens, China is emerging as a nation out onto the world stage. And they're noticing technological advancements in the West. A Chinese visitor to the U.S., let's say he goes in the United. One of the Ford Company corporate headquarters. Historian and collector, Martin Howard. Well, walking in through the front door and down the halls to the administrative area, what they're going to hear is a cacophony of sound. Okay.

He's going to get louder and louder. And then he's going to turn the corner, and he's going to be faced with rows and rows of hundreds of typists, typing away. And these typewriters, in businesses across the United States, were literally remaking English communication. Simon, it was a revolutionary machine, a paradigm shift. The typewriter speed queens are lined up to show the world how fast they are.

For three basic reasons. Number one. Then there are. Speed. A tap tappers setting the keyboards on fire. One could type four times faster than a clerk could write with a pen. Number two. You know what it's like reading other people's handwriting?

Some people's handwriting is goddamn awful. Legibility. Awful to read. It's a tremendous step forward in business efficiency. The third reason, making copies. Think about that. If it's four times faster and you're producing 10 copies at the same time, one could argue that's 40 times faster.

I think my math is right there. I think so. If it's 20 copies, then it's 80 times faster. That's mind tingling, right? And so China's like, we have to have that speed, that efficiency. We have to have these machines. And so some 50 years prior to Professor Wong's problem, You had people saying...

We've got to get rid of Chinese. I mean, Mao himself advocated for either throwing the Chinese character out completely or at a bare minimum adopting an alphabet so that they could spell out the way characters sound. Yeah, he was one of the chorus. And so the thought there was that if you alphabetize the Chinese characters, you could then lay it out on a keyboard and the problem goes away? Exactly. Okay.

Now, obviously, Chinese writing did not disappear, and there was actually a Chinese character typewriter, several of them, in fact, and what's striking about it, the model that won the day, is just how untypiratory it is. This is a typewriter with no keyboard. It's this clunky yet eloquent device with just two levers, one for your left hand, one for your right, and then this big tray bed full. of metal characters. And using those levers, you move the tray bed vertically and horizontally to line up the character you want. And then press down on the lever

that your right hand is holding. And in one fell swoop, sort of, the metal character gets sucked into the type chamber. The character swings further up towards the page on this metal arm. Oh, like a jukebox the way it reaches in and lifts up a record? Exactly.

And on its way up, rubs against a ink spool, and then strikes the paper printing the character onto the page. Before, finally... The arm swings back down and the force of it doing so

spits that metal character back into the tray bed. Dang. And, well, you could only type about half as fast on one of these as you could on a quirky English typewriter. I mean, it worked.

It was enough to stave off the death of the character. So, And for Professor Wong, 50 years later, it was a sign. A sign that instead of forcing the Chinese language to bend to the will of technology, technology could be bent to the will of the Chinese language, the Chinese character. And so to do that, he actually started by breaking down the Chinese characters themselves. Because, well, let's face it, even though Chinese doesn't have,

have an alphabet. That doesn't mean that every character in Chinese is absolutely unique and singular in a snowflake. There are pieces and components and shapes that reappear over and over in these different characters. Just imagine this is chemistry. There were tens of thousands of molecules in chemistry. But there are only 100 or so atoms. Professor Wong believed that if he could just figure out what the atoms of Chinese characters were.

The components of characters, like a shape alphabet. That he could put those on the keyboard and that people could then... Quote unquote, spell Chinese characters, not by sound, but by shape. Now, to help visualize this, let's take the character for River,

Jiang, which looks like a capital I with three dashes to its left, two near the top and one near the bottom. Got it. Now, this character, Jiang, contains two components. The first is that capital letter I, and the second is those three dashes. Now, on its own, that capital letter I is actually the character for work, and those three dashes actually represent water. Huh. So work plus water equals river. Correct. And just as with this character Jiang, these quote unquote work and water components often appear in combination with other components. So for example, those three dashes, the water component, are present in the characters for

juice and sweat and soup. Anyhow, so what we just did, taking a character and breaking it into its is what Professor Wong began to do as he searched for the most common and fundamental of these components. He got himself a room, emptied it out of everything but a couple desks. And with a small staff he'd assembled, he took 10,000 characters and began breaking them apart and making note cards. Yeah, note cards. One note card for each component. of each of the 10,000 characters he was dissecting. So, like Jiang River would get two note cards,

one with the eye on it, one with the three dashes on it. When this was all said and done, what he had laying out on these various desks... ...were 120,000 cards. If you stack them all together, they were like 12 meters tall. About the height of a 3rd, three-story building. But

of these 120,000 cards, many of them were duplicates or triplicates or quadruplicates. Like there would be at least four cards with the same water component on them, right? One from the character for River,

another from soup, and two more from sweat and juice. So from there, what he did was sorted all of the common components together, all of the water Components on that table, the work components over there, leaving him now with just several thousand piles, several thousand components. Clearly still way too many to put onto a keyboard.

So he did it again. Broke each of those components apart and made more note cards and regrouped and repiled the new common components. And he did this again. Boiling down, lower, and again. And lower. And again and again. Lower and lower.

Re-stacking pieces of paper. Yeah, just passing cards. Wow. Professor Wang did this for five years until he had it down to 125 components. The periodic table of Chinese, as he referred to it. And then how would you type with this periodic table? Well, just like texting on a flip phone.

You remember texting on a flip phone where each number key represents three different letters so that to type, say, the word, dad, you'd just type 3-2-3. Well, just like that. Professor Wong placed five or so of these components on each key of the QWERTY keyboard, so that by typing in the component pieces of a character, the computer would sum them up for you and generate it on the screen. He named his creation the Wubi method. And described Wubi as a sacred invention.

All he had to do now was convince the rest of the world. He got that opportunity in 1984. Mr. Secretary General, thank you for granting me the honor of speaking on this first day of the 38th session of the General Assembly. He was invited to the United Nations to present his invention. When he arrived, he sat down, set up his computer, you know, to demo it, and with a bunch of people watching him, he took a deep breath and started typing. And immediately... The deputy secretary, who was standing over his shoulder watching...

...was astonished to see Chinese characters rapidly appearing on the screen. In fact, she was incredulous. You know, they thought one had played a trick on them. They asked them to stand up and step away from the computer. And they flipped the keyboard. Looking for some hidden piece of hardware. And at the time, one replied, You know, what?

It's just your keyboard. It's just your keyboard. It's the same keyboard. And after this, he and Ubi went viral, He became one of the top 10 biggest names in China. He and Wubi were on the front page of newspapers. He was licensing Wubi all over the world. This sound is actually from an infomercial for Wubi,

filled with flying photos of Professor Wong sitting next to important people. I mean, for China's version of July 4th. China's National Day? He was chosen as the head of ceremonies of Henan province. I'm imagining him as like the leader of the parade with his baton in hand marching down the street. Totally. Totally.

Yeah. And then that same year, his crowning achievement. Dramatic political and economic changes are taking place in the world's most populous country. April the 4th, 1984. A new leader, Hugh Yao Bang. Hu Yao Bang, the head of the Communist Party, came to visit Professor Juan. And sitting down with him, the most powerful man in China at the time.

After Juan explained his invention, Hu Yaoban stood up and asked. Comrade Yong Ming, do we still need to forsake Chinese characters? And Juan replied, No, no. Chinese characters don't need to be replaced. They can be efficiently input, just like English. Hu Yao Bang went back to Beijing, and, according to Professor Wang, not long after, the state commission for language reform.

That government body looking into how to do away with the Chinese character. Was closed, shut down. In no small part. Because of Wang's invention. Companies were using Ubi, students were taught to use Ubi. Learning Ubi became synonymous with learning how to use the computer. He had saved thousands of years of the Chinese language and given it a place in the modern world.

And as far as Professor Wang was concerned, To be this person was to be placed alongside, I don't know, Ford, Thomas Edison. Steve Jobs, perhaps? Steve Jobs, yeah, this sort of singular genius inventor. So he sort of at this point has slayed the dragon. He is the victor. He was, or he thought he was. The battle hasn't finished.

In fact, it was only beginning. When we come back for break, Chinese typing gets predictive and the keyboards start directing us. Jad, Radio Lab, back to producer Simon Adler. So before the break, Professor Wong had seemingly solved this massive technological linguistic challenge, and saved the Chinese character. He'd found a way to type Chinese with a plain old quirty keyboard. But thinking back to the beginning, when you took me to that cafe, Simon, and we heard about all the different ways people were using the keyboard in that Hong Kong Starbucks,

how did we get from Wang doing, making his method, to suddenly, like, infinite ways of typing? So first of all, well, Professor Wong really cracked, this thing open, he wasn't alone. I mean, there were others who had been hammering and chipping away at this problem as well. So from the beginning, you had a few variations, a few different ways to type.

However, after Wobie, things do really explode. Because underlying Wobie was this subtle but spectacular departure. The keyboard changed from something where what you typed was what you got to a system where

you were telling the machine certain features or characteristics of the Chinese character that you wanted on the page or, I guess, on the screen. Again, historian Tom Mullaney. It seems like a minor distinction when you say it, but once you do that, once you have entered into a reality in which A is not equal to A, I don't, I push the button that has the little symbol A on it, and I no longer expect that symbol to appear on the paper or the screen. Effectively, I can set the letter A equal to any property of the Chinese character that I want. A could equal that water component or that work component or something far more abstract. Anything goes. And so in the early 1980s, different ideas about how to do this started to flood in. Oh, you mean beyond Wubey?

Oh, yes. At that time, many people and companies developed their own IME. This is Joe Ming. Joe Ming, computer scientists, are in Microsoft Research Asia. And he was really on the front line of this development. Immediately, there are over 1,000 methods developed and put into use. So just a couple of quick examples here. Some of these broke the characters into components that looked like English letters.

Does I mean look at the characters and be like, I think there's a D in that picture? Exactly. And then place those components on their, English look-like key. So A represented a sort of mountain-peak looking component. Wow. Others looked to English spelling.

So the component for tree was represented by the letter T. Others had you input just what was present in like the four corners of the character. And then going even further afield. Some of these don't even use letters at all. They just use the numeral bank

of the keyboard. You know that square number pad on the right side of most keyboards? In essence, every character was given its own numeric code that you would tap in there. 4303, dog, 9080, fire, almost like a clerk ringing up vegetables at a grocery store checkout. And we're just scratching the surface here. I was starting to dawn on me what you mean when you say, if we go to that Starbucks, everybody would have their own preferred way of going from those 26 Roman letters

to the thousands of different Chinese characters. Right. And I'll say that the competition between these methods got heated. Yeah, people are actually fighting each other. Oh, really? Really. For example, in some time... Ming says at one conference he attended, someone actually had to be thrown out. Yeah. Because of a fight.

This kind of thing happens. And what they were fighting and arguing over was just like with the typewriter way back when, speed. Every single new input system, the inventor claimed we haven't achieved maximum speed yet. and that my system, it's easier to use and faster. And one way they went about this, pushing the limits of the speed, was by trying to predict what it was the typist was trying to say. Both predictive text and auto-completion were anticipated in Chinese information technology decades before they were in English language computing and new media. To get to the character you want faster and faster. So the way this began was you'd be typing in the components of the character, but before you'd finish typing them all in, it would guess what it thought you were going for and offer you a couple of options.

And it would give you those options ranked by the probability that this is the one you want. But then even that wasn't fast enough. Almost immediately, people started to think about next character suggestions. So predicting and suggesting not just the character you were trying to type, but also the next. character, the next word you are going to type. And so if someone types in the character, Bay, meaning north, it is a very high likelihood that the very next character is going to be Jing for Beijing or maybe Befong for Northern. So I'll give you that as a suggestion.

And keep in mind, this is the 1980s, a full decade before we had anything comparable here in the United States. Anyhow, right as all these technological changes were taking place, The Chinese language itself changed. Tomorrow, ABC News will begin conforming to the Chinese standardization of its languages spelling and pronunciation. Pin Yin, it's called. China went all in on pinion. Pinion.

Pinion. Pinion is a way of using the Latin alphabet to spell out the sounds or the pronunciation of Chinese characters and words. Interesting. So it's an oral, oral, oral. Yes. A. U. Correct.

The big advantage of Pynion is that it more accurately reflects the actual Chinese pronunciation of a name or place. So for example, Beijing, B-E-I-J-I-N-G is Pinyin for the two characters, Bay and Jing. Now, Pinyon had been around for a while, but in the 1980s, right around the time Professor Wang saved the Chinese character from the threat of computers. The Chinese government started to prioritize Pynion. in the classroom. So that when a Chinese kindergartner begins developing literacy and reading and writing,

they learn pinion at the same time or even earlier than they start to learn Chinese characters. Really? Yeah. And so these computer scientists who had spent years trying to figure out how to visually relate Chinese characters to the letters on a keyboard. They think to themselves, basically we have the Chinese educational system teaching a way of relating the Latin alphabet to Chinese characters. So it would be kind of foolish not to exploit that.

Like we should start in putting characters by typing their sounds in Pinyin. And now, of course, Professor Wong... ...was staunchly opposed to this. When we use Piny to type, we lose sight of the Chinese character's form, and the form is the soul of a character. It's like you're grabbing hold of a person and doing away with their flesh.

You can't express the meaning of a Chinese character by its sound. And the more people use Ping-in, the more schooled Chinese characters are. Nonetheless, beginning in the early 1990s, Chinese input moved to phonetic Pinyin input, replacing character-shaped systems like Professor Wang's. Actually, at the moment, I don't know if you can hear me clearly. I mean, to the point that, as Yang Yang told me, if you go into a Starbucks in China today, yes, people will be typing using different methods, but... Most chances are they are typing with ping-in. Some sort of pinion editor.

Yeah. And, I mean, that's one of the thing that actually saddens me after this interview. And because by all means, Professor Juan, he is... is right about it, that you do forget how to write Chinese if you are so used to typing in Ping Ying. And that happens to me. You know, it's throughout our interviews, you know, that lasted so long. I didn't have the heart to tell him that I couldn't type in Ubi, which just to confirm that young generation has no hope in preserving the Chinese culture anyhow. But even as young Chinese people, I don't know, as they sit down at their computers or stare down at their phones,

are being drawn away from this long, rich history of Chinese characters and towards this pinion phonetic future, the allure of speed and the search for the fastest way to type continues. Absolutely. The question still remains, what is the best fastest way to do this? And so, what you have today in China are these typing competitions. Yeah, there are typing competitions in Chinese. Where these different methods and different typists face off. And these things are sort of a big deal.

They take place at the local level, at the national level. They're sometimes even televised. In a certain sense, it's like America's got talent for input. This audio is from the finals of a competition back in 2016, took place at China's e-sports hall in Beijing, and the broadcast opens with the audience looking down towards a young lady MC, who's standing in front of 10 or so desks, each with a computer on them. And before the race can begin, she invites the contestants out to stand with her on the front of the stage, this crew of lanky glasses and t-shirt wearing Han Chinese folks.

They introduced themselves one by one. And then also... This is a little bit like sponsoring race car drivers for your brand. They declare which input method they'll be using. Because oftentimes the folks who designed the input methods, have actually hired and trained these super speedy typists to use their input method. Huh.

With the introductions done, the MC sends the typists back to their keyboards, some of which are interestingly blank, like, they have no script on them at all. And in essence, what happens is a text appears on the screen that no one in the competition has seen, the same text for everyone in the competition. You know, the stopwatch starts. And the race is on. Just like, I mean, they're just like, it's like unbelievable the speed at which they're going. The room is totally silent other than the clacking of keys.

The cameras cutting between contestants, capturing these over-the-shoulder shots of their screens, just filling with text. And when they do linger on one typist screen long enough, and really you'd need to almost go frame by frame to catch this, but what you see is a typist inputting a string of sort of nonsense letters, which prompts a little tiny box to pop up with five or so options, which they then select from with one final keystroke. how many like uh words characters per minute can they type uh 244 was the winning yeah that's insane

that's insane yeah i didn't understand i did not understand simon that's so fast oh my god yeah my dad who's the fastest type as i know he he can only do like 80 that's that's that That's a, that is, that's kind of wild. Well, and wilder still, in this competition, the winning typist was using... So, Wangman-Wubi-Zinn's number one. Really? Yes, the guy who typed 244 characters a minute was using Professor Wong's Wubi. Wow.

Whoa. Yeah. That's, so they're, they're, they're, they're, clobbering us for speed, but also able to do that in a way that preserves character writing. And this is not uncommon. Like, oftentimes in these competitions, it's these older wubby-like input methods that win. Ironically, by all accounts, their top speeds are faster than the top possible speeds of phonetic input. Wow.

So wait, but then if he's made this thing that is like so blazingly fast and also is able to sort of preserve Chinese way of writing, goes back, thousands of years, why is it that these other input methods, these phonetic-based methods, are winning in terms of usage? Right. Well, the reason there is pretty much the Chinese government. The Chinese state promote the idea of phonetic-based input systems really for one major reason. One of the same reasons they prioritize teaching pinion in school. The unification of the Chinese language. Because, although when we think of the Chinese language, we think, oh, there's Mandarin and Cantonese, in reality, when it comes to speaking, there are dozens of different Chinese languages, Cantonese, Shanghaiese, Fujianese, languages that sound totally different, but on the page look the exact same, because they're all using the same characters.

Now, with a structure, shape-based input like Wooby, where you're describing what the character looks like, you can type and still maintain your spoken language. It doesn't care if you speak Cantonese or Fujianese or something or so forth, because you're typing it based on what the character looks like, not how you pronounce it. But if you get people having to learn phonetic-based input systems, they have no choice really but to learn to type and speak the standard pronunciation of every character. And so now, in a sense, the ubiquity of the QWERTY keyboard is being deployed to erase difference and quiet dissent.

Look no further than Wubi. The very commission that was closed down by Wubi? The commission on language reform. They came back to life. And they kick the Ubi method out of schools. And you can argue that which typing method you use. how you type has a real impact that goes beyond the death of the Chinese character or beyond the government's desire for unification of the language, beyond China itself. And so let me give you

an admittedly small example of this. There's this aptly named thing called the QWERTY effect. Have you heard of the QWERTY effect? Go go for it. So this is an English study. It was initially done here in the States in the early 2000s. They did a bunch of tests on people trying to find what feelings they associated with words. And what they found was that people like words that have more letters in them typed from the right hand of a quirky keyboard than not. No way. Yeah. So the U's and the L's and the P's and the Ks and the M's and the J's, those are having more positive associations than the QWs, X, disease, ours.

Yeah. People like O more than they like E. This has been found in English and Spanish and German and in Dutch, both for right-handed people and left-handed people. But couldn't that just be that the keyboard was designed so that the letters that we like happen to just be on the right side?

Do you know what I mean? Like, is it a chicken or the egg type of situation? It likely is not that. It's likely not that those letters were intentionally placed there. And there are a variety of stories about how the layout of the Quirty Keyboard happened. But sort of one of the indisputed facts is, if you look at the top row of your keyboard,

QWERTY row, it has all of the letters of the word typewriter in it. T-Y-P-E-R-I-T, yeah. They're all there. The story goes that the reason it was laid out this way is because you had these salesmen who would show up and want to demo the product, demo this typewriter, but these guys didn't know how to type. So they put all the letters for typewriter on the top row

so they could very quickly punch out the word typewriter in their down. Oh, wow. So it's totally arbitrary. Like, it was put in the order it was put for reasons that have nothing to do with anything we're talking about. Yes, correct. And there is some evidence that the layout of the keyboard created those left-right preferences rather than the other way around. So just a couple of years ago, researchers asked,

Okay, has our feeling towards letters changed over time? And so what they did was they got social security records from the 1960s through 2012, and they looked at names of babies being born. And they decided, we're going to pick 1990 as our year that the QWERTY keyboard became ubiquitous. And let's look at the prevalence of names with more right-handed letters than left before 1990 and after. And it spikes after 19. No way. It's crazy.

So suddenly a lot of Pauls and a lot of like lias and start to appear. Yep. That is bizarre. So like Simon is four right hand, one left hand. Jad is one right hand, two left hand. So you and I bear out the idea. Yeah, you know, it's funny. It's like there's, who is it?

Was it Wittgenstein? I don't think it was Wittgenstein. Heidegger? Was it a Heidegger thing? somebody one of those like those nihilistic german philosophers had this idea that the hammer isn't just a tool the hammer actually feeds back the hammer changes the hand right and it's interesting to me that this arbitrary leftover arguably outdated quirky keyboard that we're all stuck with is actually influencing our preferences when it comes to naming our offspring I mean who knows what else it's doing it's probably doing all kinds of weird things to us wait so do we know do we know we know No, sorry, just to get back on track. Do we know if this QWERTY naming thing is influencing the way Chinese people name their kids? Right.

Well, so with the QWERTY effect in general, the lab that I spoke to looked into studying it in China. They had some Chinese grad students, actually, who wanted to see if it applied back in China. But in part, I think, because there are so many different ways to type, they weren't methodologically. able to figure out how to do it. But I will say the idea you bring out of or you bring up of the hammer changing the hand, like where Chinese typing is going, I think is sort of the hammer changing the hand on steroids. What do you mean? Now we've got this new phase of this era of input, which is cloud input.

Typing that uses artificial intelligence. In the United States, I would say the way that people are most fit. familiar with this is the Google search bar, that when you start to type, it will give you suggestions not based on the absolute mathematical probability of the frequency of a word that you might be doing, but really what's hot in the news and what other people are searching for. However, in China, this goes way beyond search engine suggestions. In Microsoft Word, this is not a search field. This is like Microsoft Word. And you can say, okay, in the news today, some star has done something terrible and fallen from grace. And so some input user is starting to enter the name

of this befallen pop star. The system is smart enough to say, okay, this user has never entered this person's name before. But up in the cloud, millions of people are entering this particular person's name. Let's give this local user that suggestion based upon what users elsewhere in the cloud are doing. And so with this cloud-based input, like everything you write, every keystroke, every word, is being in some way influenced

by what everyone else is typing. It is totally unparalleled in the Western world. There is nothing even close to this. And in fact, now arguably over the last two decades, there has been an inversion, in which Chinese in the computational world is arguably the fastest

language in the realm of typing. And so we're the ones now looking east seeing these technologies and wondering like shit, how do we catch up? Like in the course of 40 years,

China, they've leapfrogged us. That's what it is. It feels like a crazy leapfrog. Yeah. But with this cloud input, But there's also a question of, like, do we want to catch up to that? It's both invigorating, exciting, strange, and also eerie and, you know, and post-futuristic. Because right now, it's guessing what the writer already wants to say. But what happens when the speed of suggestion outstrips the speed of thought and the speed of

intention? And what it says is, you know, Simon, what if you? did this and you say, wow, actually, that's a really good suggestion. Thank you. Yes, I will do that. At that point, we have co-writing. And once we move, once we move into the stage of, further into the stage of suggested writing, then we're not, it's, it's kind of like a writing partner that's giving you a good suggestion. But of course, it's a writing partner who's also the writing partner of thousands of other writers at that exact moment. And that is, from my standpoint, a pretty terrifying scenario. Well, right, because it's a writing partner with an

agenda potentially. Mm-hmm. It is a writing partner. I mean, and not perhaps. It has, there is agenda. Absolutely. I bet you will never type quite the same way again, Jed Abelrod. No, I definitely am looking at my QWERTY right now, and I'm very... I don't trust you. Got my eye on you, QWERTY. It's watching YouTube. Here's like, apparently.

Producer Simon Adler! The story was reported and produced by Simon, with reporting assistance by Young Young, original music throughout the piece by Simon. Special thanks again to Young Young. Without her, the story would not have happened. Also to Tom Mullaney for his years of research on this topic and for sending us down this path to begin with. And to Daniel Casasanto for teaching us about the Cordy effect, Joshua Suter, Marion Renaud, David Mosier, Chen Gau, Ryankal Chang, Martian Wickery, and Ying Ying Liu. I'm Chad Abramrod. Thanks for listening. Hi, I'm Hafiz, and I'm from Toronto.

Here are the staff credits. Radio Live is hosted by Lulu Miller and Letta Fnasar. Sorin Wheeler is our executive editor. Sarah Sandback is our executive director. Our managing editor is Pat Walters. Dylan Keefe is our director of sound design. Our staff includes Simon Adler, Jeremy Bloom, W. Harry Fortuna, David Gable, Maria Paz Gutierrez, Sinjuna Namsambandam, Matt Kielty,

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