Saturday, May 05, 2012

Elian Ambigram

Today I attempted to find an Elian ambigram. I wrote a small program to do a brute-force search through dictionary words to help. Out of all possible English words/phrases, it turns out only a handful of combinations are valid. The reason they are so rare is because Elian script has high rotational symmetry. The rotational symmetry adds constraints on how the ambigram can be constructed - standard Latin characters have far fewer constraints.

5 comments:

Anonymous said...

not sure why you would say that only a handful of english words/phrases are valid

have you checked out flipscript ambigrams? almost anything you type in can be turned into an ambigram there, including elian

Byron Knoll said...

@anonymous, this might help with your confusion: http://www.ccelian.com/concepca.html

Anonymous said...

can you post the list or at least a couple more examples? these are pretty cool

Byron Knoll said...

@anonymous, sorry, I didn't save any list of candidates (and it would take some effort for me to regenerate). When I was searching for candidates I ended up generating many lists with different constraints:

1) The length limit of words
2) The number of words (whether the search was for a single word ambigram or a multi-word phrase)
3) The set of words (I downloaded several dictionary sets - I didn't even know most of the words in the large dictionaries!)

Because there are a large number of variations for these constraints, I was just exploring the space to find the best candidate without saving any of the output lists.

Casey Hutchins said...

I did this same thing once, although I didn't account for baseline shifting. I only found one word longer than 3 letters...jelly becomes upper when turned 180 degrees. Also there is a subreddit for elian that would love to have your post! reddit.com/r/elianscript