Unicode's transliteration rules are Turing-complete

(seriot.ch)

47 points | by beefburger 17 hours ago

10 comments

beefburger 17 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.
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- bielok 16 hours ago
  Huh, very interesting find, and very lean website (:
anankaie 1 hour ago
At this point it feels more difficult to ensure that your format cannot compute than to ensure it can
ks2048 49 minutes ago
Does the Latin-Katakana example given imply that some input value can cause it to not terminate?
hyperhello 40 minutes ago
Does this mean I could post some untransliterated text here in a comment and make your browsers all do these computations?
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- ks2048 30 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
NooneAtAll3 1 hour ago
reminds me of Word's autocorrect being turing-complete https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jlX_pThh7z8 (3:57, but whole video is fun)
sgjohnson 33 minutes ago
reminded me of the PowerPoint Turing Machine
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uNjxe8ShM-8
linzhangrun 1 hour ago
Waiting for someone to vibe a compiler targeting Unicode transliteration rules...
dvt 56 minutes ago
Who implements transliteration rules? I assume operating systems? Or text renderers?
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- kccqzy 53 minutes 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.
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  - ks2048 23 minutes ago
    And ICU uses data from CLDR, which is mentioned in the blog. Here, there are 380 xml files: https://github.com/unicode-org/cldr/tree/main/common/transfo...
    Yes, ICU is ubiquitous. But, some NLP projects use various other libraries, such as uroman (just for romanization - to Latin script).
est 1 hour ago
Does it work on modern OS or just PyICU ?