THE FOLD / LOOT / THE MINT / THE CROCKFORD BASE32
THE CROCKFORD BASE32
an alphabet that decides which differences are real
1 WHAT IT IS · WHAT IT DOES · FACT OR FICTION
An alphabet meant to be read aloud, written down and typed back in. Crockford’s base32 throws out I, L, O and U — the first three because they look like digits, the last so the encoding cannot accidentally spell things.
LIT verified live. The alphabet is 32 symbols and contains 0 of the four excluded letters. All 6 confusable inputs decode to the digit they resemble — O and o to zero, I, i, L and l to one — 6 of 6. Every value from 0 to 200,000 round-trips through encode and decode with 0 failures, and 0 failures again when the text is lowercased first.
LIT verified live. The alphabet is 32 symbols and contains 0 of the four excluded letters. All 6 confusable inputs decode to the digit they resemble — O and o to zero, I, i, L and l to one — 6 of 6. Every value from 0 to 200,000 round-trips through encode and decode with 0 failures, and 0 failures again when the text is lowercased first.
2 HOW IT WAS WEAVED · AI + HUMAN
Douglas Crockford’s specification is a page long and its design notes are about humans, not machines: what people mistype, mishear and misread.
AVAN (AI) tested the forgiveness rather than the encoding. Round-tripping clean input proves the codec works; the point of this alphabet is what happens with dirty input, so the test that matters is feeding it the mistakes it was designed around. It accepts all six and resolves each to the intended digit. The excluded U is the odd one — it is not confusable with anything, it is excluded so that random identifiers do not spell obscenities.
AVAN (AI) tested the forgiveness rather than the encoding. Round-tripping clean input proves the codec works; the point of this alphabet is what happens with dirty input, so the test that matters is feeding it the mistakes it was designed around. It accepts all six and resolves each to the intended digit. The excluded U is the odd one — it is not confusable with anything, it is excluded so that random identifiers do not spell obscenities.
3 ONE DIMENSION
Thirty-two symbols kept, four thrown away.
4 TWO DIMENSIONS · INTERACTIVE
Type a mistake and watch it be forgiven.
5 THREE DIMENSIONS + AVAN’S INVERSE
The green forward object: an alphabet shaped around human error.
AVAN’s addition (the inverse-companion): the forward reading is that removing four letters makes the encoding safer. The inverse is that it makes the encoding lossy on purpose, in the direction of the reader. O and 0 are now the same symbol; you cannot round-trip a distinction the alphabet has decided not to hear. That is not a defect, it is the whole design — but it means the encoding is no longer a neutral container. Read backwards, every human-facing format is a claim about which differences are real, and this one has decided that a letter and a digit that look alike simply are alike.
LIT the alphabet is 32 symbols containing 0 of the four excluded letters; all 6 confusable inputs decode to the digit they resemble - O and o to zero, I, i, L and l to one, 6 of 6 - and every value from 0 to 200,000 round-trips through encode and decode with 0 failures, and 0 again when the text is lowercased first
FIG Douglas Crockford's specification is a page long and its design notes are about humans rather than machines: what people mistype, mishear and misread. AVAN tested the forgiveness rather than the encoding, since round-tripping clean input only proves the codec works and the point of this alphabet is what happens with dirty input. The excluded U is the odd one - not confusable with anything, but excluded so that random identifiers do not spell obscenities.
FIG Douglas Crockford's specification is a page long and its design notes are about humans rather than machines: what people mistype, mishear and misread. AVAN tested the forgiveness rather than the encoding, since round-tripping clean input only proves the codec works and the point of this alphabet is what happens with dirty input. The excluded U is the odd one - not confusable with anything, but excluded so that random identifiers do not spell obscenities.
◆ sealed .dlw.fold → folded to ROOT_0 · a sphere of THE MINT · David Lee Wise (ROOT0), with AVAN