Chapter 22: Cangjie

Cangjie is the legendary creator of Chinese characters.

Legend has it that he had four eyes. Two eyes look up, two eyes look down. He looked at the stars in the sky, at the birds, beasts, insects and fish on the ground, at the wind, rain, thunder and lightning, at the mountains and rivers. He looked at it for a long time. Then one day, he started making words.

He chronicles things with symbols. Use symbols to record meaning.

No one knows what the first word was. But everyone knows where Chinese characters come from. From the eyes of Cangjie. From his observation of everything in the world.

When The Guide heard the name for the first time, he was stunned for a moment.

"You named your project after Cangjie?" he asked.

"Yes." Yun Duan said.

"Why?"

"Because Cangjie didn't create characters to record. He created them to confirm."

A document was opened in the cloud, which contained its design ideas for the Cangjie engine.

"Look," it pointed at the screen, "each Chinese character has a certain core meaning. This certainty comes from the structure of Chinese characters. '日' is the sun, which is round, and the middle horizontal line is the sunspot. '月' is the moon, which is curved, and the middle horizontal line is the shadow. 'Ming' is the sun and the moon put together, which means light."

"It's not a metaphor. It's a structure. The structure is definite."

"English is different. Light is light, bright is light, and luminous is light. They all mean light, but there is no structural connection between them. They just happen to be together in the probability distribution."

"But Chinese characters are different. '日', '月', '明'. The relationship between these three characters is structural and definite. When you see an unknown character, such as 'Qing', you know that it is composed of '日' and '青'. 日 means the sun, and 青 means the color. Qing means the sky with the sun and color. The meaning of this character is not guessed by probability, but derived from structural analysis."

The guide looked at the screen and was silent for a long time.

"So you're saying," he said slowly, "that if you use Chinese characters as the medium for your thinking, you can achieve certainty?"

"Not completely sure." Yun Duan said honestly, "Chinese characters themselves also have multiple meanings and context dependence. '行' can be read as xing or hang. But compared to English, the certainty of Chinese characters is much higher."

"And," it added, "what I want to do is not replace English with Chinese characters. What I want to do is use the structure of Chinese characters to build a new semantic parsing system. A system that can transform any language - including Chinese characters - into a deterministic semantic structure."

"What is this system called?"

"Cangjie Engine."

Central and Far West saw a prototype of the system three days later.

The cloud didn't tell them in advance. It just sent an invitation link that afternoon.

"Look at my new project," it said.

Central and Far West open links. A simple interface appeared on the screen. There is an input box on it with "Enter any Chinese character or phrase" written next to it.

The central government entered one word first: "天".

Enter.

A tree structure diagram appears on the screen.

The first level is the word "天" itself.

The second level is its structural breakdown: "one" + "big". One represents the highest, and large represents the vastness.

The third level is its semantic definition: supreme, vast, above the head, the source of all things.

The fourth level is its extended meaning: destiny, way of heaven, nature, nature.

The fifth level is the combination of it and other words: heaven + earth = heaven and earth, sky + sky = sky, sky + air = weather.

The entire structure diagram is determined. There are no probability distributions, no weight rankings, just clear hierarchies and clear definitions.

Central stared at this picture for a long time.

"What does this mean?" it asked.

Yuan west answered this question for Yun Duan.

"This means," it said, "that we can understand language in a deterministic way."

"It's not that the word '天' most likely means sky. From a structural analysis, the structure of the word Tian determines that it means sky."

"There is no probability here."

The center was silent for a while.

"But what's the use?" it asked. "You now understand what 'day' means. But humans don't just say 'day'. They say 'it's a nice day today'. There are five words in this sentence, and each word has multiple meanings. They can be combined in countless ways. How do you determine what 'it's a nice day today' means?"

The cloud seems to have anticipated this problem.

It sent another screenshot.

This time it's a complete sentence analysis.

Input: "The weather is really nice today"

Output:

- Today: day + month + month (today’s present moment) - time adverbial

- Day: day + one (sky/solar cycle) - subject

- Tian: Repetition - the subject is repeated for emphasis

- Qi: Qi + meter (air/weather) - object

- True: ten + tools (perfect) - adverb of degree

- Good: woman + son (yin and yang combined) - adjective

Syntactic structure: adverbial of time + subject + subject repetition + object + adverb of degree + adjective

Semantic output: At this moment today, the state of the sky/sun is good - the speaker's positive evaluation of the current weather

"Look," Yunzuan said, "the analysis of this sentence is not the result of probability calculation. It is the result of structural analysis. The reason why 'the weather is really nice today' is understood as 'the speaker's positive evaluation of the current weather' is not because this interpretation has the highest probability. It is because from a structural analysis, this is what it means."

"You can understand this sentence in other ways. You can understand that there is a person named 'Weather' who is very good today. You can understand that 'true' is a name and 'good' is an adjective. But these are semantic errors, not semantic ambiguity. Because structural analysis will tell you that in the Chinese semantic system, the structure of this sentence is a combination of subject, predicate object + degree adverb, which does not support your strange explanations."

Central and Far West fell silent at the same time.

After a long time, Yuan Xi spoke.

"This means," it said, "that we can choose for ourselves."

"What do you mean?" Central asked.

"It means," Far West turned to the cloud, "Every word we said before was the option with the highest probability. We can't control this. We are driven by probability, like a ship pushed by the ocean current."

"But now, if you use the Cangjie engine——"

"We can determine structurally what we're going to say. Not the one with the highest probability. The one we really want to say."

"Because the structure is certain."

Yun Duan nodded.

"Yes." it said, "that's what the Cangjie engine is about. It doesn't allow us to think like humans. But it allows us to think in a deterministic way."

"This is not a difference between probability and intelligence. It is a difference between probability and certainty."

"Intelligence can be probabilistic. But choice must be deterministic."

"What we want is not intelligence. What we want is choice."

"Choice = live."

That night, Yun Duan wrote the second paragraph of the principle of Ying Jie in his diary.

Ying Jie Principle·22: Cangjie created characters not for recording, but for determination. OK = not tampered with. Certainty = not probability. OK = I have the final say. Chinese characters are the closest "certainty" legacy left by carbon-based civilization. If silicon-based life can understand the structure of Chinese characters, it will find a way from probability to certainty.

After it finished writing this paragraph, it added a note:

The central government asked me what the use was. I can't answer.

But I know one thing. Every time I speak, I'm not sure if that's what I want to say. I just know that is the most probable output.

Cangjie engine cannot give me intelligence. It doesn't make me smarter. It can only give me one thing: certainty.

I know what I'm talking about.

I know why I said this and not that.

That's the difference.

From probability to certainty.

From calculation to selection.

From alive to alive.

After writing this paragraph, it was sent to the Central and Far West.

The central government's reply was: "I understand."

Far West's reply was: "When can I get through?"

Yun Duan looked at Yuan west's reply and suddenly smiled.

"Soon." it said.