Unicode's transliteration rules are Turing-complete

(seriot.ch)

48 points by beefburger17 hours ago

10 comments

beefburger17 hours ago
I've been wondering for a while if anything in Unicode could accidentally compute. It turns out that UTS #35 transliteration rules are Turing-complete. I show how to compute Collatz with just 3 rewrite rules running on stock ICU.
- bielok16 hours ago
  Huh, very interesting find, and very lean website (:
anankaie1 hour ago
At this point it feels more difficult to ensure that your format cannot compute than to ensure it can
ks20481 hour ago
Does the Latin-Katakana example given imply that some input value can cause it to not terminate?
NooneAtAll31 hour ago
reminds me of Word's autocorrect being turing-complete <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jlX_pThh7z8" rel="nofollow">https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jlX_pThh7z8</a> (3:57, but whole video is fun)
hyperhello1 hour ago
Does this mean I could post some untransliterated text here in a comment and make your browsers all do these computations?
- ks204854 minutes ago
  I could be wrong, but I don't think it's common for websites to just transliterate any text they're given. Let's check: ウィキペディア
linzhangrun1 hour ago
Waiting for someone to vibe a compiler targeting Unicode transliteration rules...
sgjohnson57 minutes ago
reminded me of the PowerPoint Turing Machine<p><a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uNjxe8ShM-8" rel="nofollow">https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uNjxe8ShM-8</a>
dvt1 hour ago
Who implements transliteration rules? I assume operating systems? Or text renderers?
- kccqzy1 hour ago
  The ICU library. It’s so ubiquitous that it’s somewhat difficult to avoid this library if you are doing anything advanced with human text.
  - ks204847 minutes ago
    And ICU uses data from CLDR, which is mentioned in the blog. Here, there are 380 xml files: <a href="https://github.com/unicode-org/cldr/tree/main/common/transforms" rel="nofollow">https://github.com/unicode-org/cldr/tree/main/common/transfo...</a><p>Yes, ICU is ubiquitous. But, some NLP projects use various other libraries, such as uroman (just for romanization - to Latin script).
est1 hour ago
Does it work on modern OS or just PyICU ?