[soperj]

Curious why they go through each letter saying yes or no, instead of just teaching them how to pick letters based on a binary output (ie: a= 00000, b=00001)? you'd think the characters per minute would increase dramatically.

[tobylane]

Morse code, where dot is ‘think about tennis’ and dash is ‘think about home’?

https://amp.theguardian.com/science/2010/feb/03/vegetative-s...

[hackmiester]

It occurs to me that this is a binary search on the alphabet, but could be made into a much more human-compatible format: “Is the letter in the first half of the alphabet?” “Is the letter between A and F?”

[eternityforest]

I'm not sure that's exactly human friendly. Can people answer questions like that without training? Would the amount of thought needed create a noise signal?

If they have vision, you could ask "Which of these two sets is the letter in", where the sets were dynamically generated by predictive software.

[soperj]

yeah, I guess you'd start with the first 13/last 13 and break it down in halves from there. It would take only 6 choices to pick a letter. I still think memorizing the binary version of the letters would be faster, and wouldn't take all that long considering the amount of use.

[dn3500]

The code is (or can be) the same either way. I imagine after a few days the user would memorize the codes for the letters and skip the prompts.

On a related note, one character per minute is about the same speed as the first trans-atlantic telegraph cable in 1858.

[DarylZero]

You want a variable length code that takes into account letter frequencies.

[tgb]

There’s relevant scenes to this in the Stephen Hawking biopic, The Theory of Everything.