Qwerty Effect
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After a hard day of driving and caching recently, I finally had time to log caches and relax. While my wife was watching her shows on the TV, I decided to listen to a few podcasts while typing. One of my favorite podcasts to help me relax and learn about the world around us is Radiolab. I’ve had people ask me where I come up with some of my puzzles. Well, here is a look behind the curtain for a new puzzle cache.
This particular week, the show was called “The Wubi Effect”. No need to listen to the episode, but it discusses the impact keyboard layouts have upon our lives, especially how the centuries-old Chinese written language was almost made obsolete by the advent of the keyboard. Early computer systems, especially dot matrix printers, did not have the means to process and display Chinese characters. Instead of the 26 letters we use in American English, Chinese has over 70,000 characters. As they say in the podcast, that would be more than the equivalent of trying to get each key on our keyboards to represent all 26 letters of our alphabet.
Long story short, Professor Wang Yongmin developed a system to encode the characters using the same QWERTY keyboard most people around the world use. He named his method of encoding Chinese characters on a Western keyboard the Wubi Method.
As an aside, I once had a Chinese exchange student in my math classes. She would pick away at the keys on her phone creating (building?) the characters she needed to keep in touch with her friends and family back in mainland China. She explained the same technique developed by Professor Yongmin, and showed me the process of how the letter “A” could stand for different things. It was very much like the first “smart” phones that had us typing 8 33 99 8 0 6 33 7777 7777 2 4 33 to say “text message”.
Without this, one could argue that world history would be different. Chinese culture would have been forced to Westernize their language 50 years ago. Instead of this major change, Chinese shifted to phonetic spelling of words. Traditional Mandarin was replaced with Pinyin. That’s why the “Peking” I grew up knowing as the capital of China became Beijing.
Today, the Chinese have moved beyond Wubi and developed predictive typing methods to help enter these characters faster by taking the initial character entered, looking at the context of the message thus far, and suggesting the next data that would most likely be used. Your phone knows what words you have used frequently in the past and suggests you use those words again. It is just like your search bar giving you a list of searches as you start to type a search item, this is how most Chinese typists enter characters. They start the word and most of the rest is done by artificial intelligence (AI) suggestions for them to continue. This was already being used by my exchange student in 2011, long before the West was even thinking about AI for everyday use!
In fact, the latest improvement in this system now involves Cloud Technology. As you (the Chinese typist) start to input a character, the AI looks at what others are typing about at the same time to see if there is a popular word being used at that moment that you may want to input. If thousands of people were typing “how do I solve rkoehn1’s puzzle caches?” and you started to enter the symbol for “how,” your keyboard would probably suggest the rest of that query to you. Using these techniques, the best Chinese typists can enter over 200 characters per minute while typing on a smart device linked to the internet.
The podcast then goes on to discuss a phenomenon known as ‘The QWERTY Effect.’ From this study (link is to a pdf):
“On average, words typed with more letters from the right side of the QWERTY keyboard are more positive in meaning than words typed with more letters from the left: This is the QWERTY effect (Jasmin & Casasanto, 2012)”.
In this study, words in Portuguese, German and English with positive connotations or meanings were given a RSA score by taking (number of right hand typed characters – number of left hand typed characters). The study conclusively found that
“n five experiments, here we replicate the QWERTY effect in a large corpus of English words, extend it to two new languages (Portuguese and German), and show that the effect is mediated by space-valence associations encoded at the level of individual letters.”
Astonishing! (ONIHIN – ASTSG = +1 RSA score)
One page 5 of the linked study, they expand their research into the impact the QWERTY Effect has had on names given to English speaking children in the post-AOL world. Believe it or not, they have found that names have become more right-hand typing dominant. You can see the difference on page 5 of the linked pdf. While the pre- and post-QWERTY names are both normally distributed, there is a definite shift to the right in the post-QWERTY graph.
This got me thinking, if we relied upon predictive AI that emphasized the QWERTY Effect to help us name our babies, what would we get in the future? Well, I fired up the same ChatGPT that helped me write several traditional cache descriptions in the past and asked it this question: Using the QWERTY Effect as a guide, and ignoring past naming conventions, what would the top six boys’ and girls’ names be? It went to work. Man, what it spit out made me scratch my head.
Sure, here are some creative and unique names that could score high on the QWERTY effect, considering the letters' accessibility on a keyboard. Keep in mind that these are entirely speculative and unconventional names:
Boys: kpwby tpwbj-tpfw bdrocr tpfw pkr sux
Girls: drsb rugybj kukr byuwbj-kukr tpwbj-tucr kukr
Please note that these names are highly unconventional and might not align with established naming norms. The QWERTY effect is just one small factor that could influence naming trends, and the uniqueness and pronunciation of a name also play significant roles.
Now, it’s your time to get to work, man!
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Brought to you by the Computer Science, Foreign Language, Typing Dynamics and Neonatology Departments of Sandland Travel Bug University.