Some Further Experiments in the Parallel Processing of Pictures

While considerable attention has been devoted to the problems of automatic character recognition, either handwritten or printed, almost all such work has involved static examination of the characters. Little attention'12 has been paid to techniques for dynamic character recognition, i.e., examination during the time of formation, presumably because such processes have tended to be inefficient as communication techniques and wasteful of computer time. With the recent interest in closer man-machine coupling3 and the development of computer time-sharing techniques' to make such coupling economic, it is important to consider ways to utilize manual printing as a link to a computer system, particularly since the size and nature of the character sets available on convention keyboards is restricted compared to the symbol requirements in many disciplines. For example, it would be very useful to be able to describe a mathematic expression to a FORTRAN compiler using normal mathematical forms including integral signs, etc.