Electronic dictionaries implemented in bubble memories

Tens of thousands of Chinese characters can be decomposed into about 300 radicals. A Chinese character can be coded according to the constituent radicals encountered in sequence in tracing the character in a Z path. The decomposition and coding permit the storage of 20,000 Chinese characters in a 10⁶bit bubble memory module (in contrast to 1000 characters coded in 32 × 32 dot matrix). Binary search is used to reduce the search time to 0.1 sec. (in contrast to 10 sec. needed for exhaustive search). Tables linked by pointers (i.e. a dictionary) are used to facilitate the translation among Chinese, English, and French words. A prototype of this application is built with the INTEL 1Mb bubble memory module hosted in an INTEL microcomputer development system.