Character Energy Analysis
Biomechanical analysis of writing systems through character-level stroke modeling.
What it measures
- Two-axis motor cost (finger flexion + wrist pivot) per character
- Ink distance, curvature, pen lifts, transition angles between characters
- Distinctiveness, perimetric complexity, convex hull ratio, topology
- 65 characters across Latin, Greek, and Cyrillic scripts
Key findings
- Writing systems optimize a Pareto trade-off between cheapness and distinctiveness
- Letter frequency does NOT correlate with writing energy (r = +0.054)
- Cognate pairs (A, B, E, etc.) show near-identical energy across scripts
- Cyrillic complex (serif) has ~3x perimetric complexity of simplex scripts
Included
- Hershey vector font stroke extraction
- 8 calibrated measurement primitives with motor control literature citations
- Cross-script comparison pipeline
- Pareto frontier and correlation mining
- 12 output visualizations