The secret of the tera-keyboard






The tera-keyboard









What exactly is being input?







The “secret”



7 thoughts on “The secret of the tera-keyboard

  1. I would argue that it’s a substitute for the high-bandwidth 4-pin direct brain connection that is used fairly consistently for brain-computer I/O. There are a couple of ways that the chorded keyboard might be superior than a direct brain connection:

    – Interoperability, since the 4-pin connection might not be a universal standard, especially since the example cited above is an American official interfacing with a Japanese computer, and
    – Security, as using the keyboard is a method of unidirectional communication, whereas the direct connection has shown itself to be susceptible to hacking.

    So if one were interfacing with an unknown and untrusted computer terminal but wanted to keep up with the bandwidth of a direct connection, this keyboard would be an ideal compromise. I don’t think that “thinking fast enough” would be an impediment, since everyone in GiTS has a cyberbrain implant (even Togusa, who was “all natural” otherwise) that should help.

  2. So you’re saying that this keyboard allows as many combinations as the brain would have if each neuron had 10 different states. This presumes that all those states have been mapped and are known to the user and to the system.
    Given the diversity of the brains, the development of this communication protocol is in itself preety amazing. But it might be limited, for instance … is 10 states enough? Is it only states of the neurons what matter?
    I mean, we don’t know, science has not figured that out yet.

    Also, why would the computer need to know the entire state of your brain?
    I’m thinking that, even if the protocol allows for the entire current state, the user can chose what part of that state to reveal. This is useful, as said in the prior comment, for security reasons, you don’t want to reveal all you’re thinking of. But even more important is the hability to direct the computer to solve the one issue you want to solve right now, if you give it the full contents of your consciousness the computer might get confused and start solving a different problem that is not the one you intended, that why it might be good to only reveal part of your brain’s status all the time.

    • I’m really just noting that it’s the closest thing we have that might be represented by the implied data rate. There’s lots of questions around this conjecture of course.

      I agree that a selective disclosure is more desirable. Maybe that’s the power of the mechahands, in that it only expresses conscious thought.

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  4. Coming late to the game here, but i think it’s important to note the differences between written Japanese and say, English. (Note: i’m not including the totals in unicode in this example, too lazy to look them up.)

    English has only 26 letters, 10 Arabic numbers, the variety of punctuation marks, plus the other functions typically mapped onto a keyboard, which gets arranged into a small number of keyboard layouts (the 104-key QWERTY being the current norm for most users).

    Japanese, on the other hand, has 2 seperate syllabaries (each consisting of 113 characters), up to 85 000 Kanji characters (of which only 2 000 to 3 000 are considered to be in “common” use, but at least 13 000 of which are coded for in industrial standards for Kanji), 10 Arabic numbers (when used instead of the native Kanji), the native and imported punctuation marks, plus the same other functions typically mapped on to keyboards, which then gets mapped onto either a keyboard printed in English characters (requiring knowledge of how to get the exact characters desired) or with Hiragana and English characters.

    (Note: i have no experience with either keyboard, so i’m not sure how well that they work beyond the known limitation of the Shift-JIS standard to something well below the total number of possible characters, a bit over 6000, if i recall correctly).

    So as far as the hand-splitting and funky keyboard go, would it not then be reasonable to think that perhaps this is merely a method for actually getting all the possible combinations in there? Especially when considering that it could be labelled with the 252 radicals (parts of individual Kanji which combine into whole Kanji) plus katakana, hiragana, some arabic numerals, etc. In which case, 9 keys pressed at once could be necessary for typing a single Kanji?

    (Sources: and wwwJDIC)

  5. While your conjecture is possible, it sounds to me more like it is an easy way of manually transferring a compressed file. You type the compression dictionary at the start, then hit the combination of keys that matches the compression key you transfer next. That way you could transfer a file, say a program, virus, etc, much more quickly onto an airgapped computer then you could retype and compile the source code.

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