Bad ness 0
Sen. Bill Cassidy of Louisiana, representing the
(Epsom’s version)
Dr. Tom Mur phy VII, Ph.D.
March 2024
Many peo ple w alk this Earth un both ered by incor -
rect de tails. For exam ple, they are un con cerned
when a hy per link includes a sur round ing space
char acter. They don’t no tice that the screw heads
on a light switch w all plate are not all lined up.
They don’t care about the rules of Wordle’s “hard
mode” being sim ply wrong. They don’t no tice the
dif ference betw een “its” and “it’s.” When some -
one asks, “W ill you marry me?” and they think
“Oh my god!” it’s not because the pro poser prob a-
bly should hav e used the sub junc tiv e would.
I am not like this. If I can infer from a coffee cup’s
mo ment of inertia that it does not con tain any liq-
uid, I im me di ately lose sus pen sion of dis belief and
will not pur chase the prod uct featured in the com -
mer cial. I literally pro jectile vomit if Auto-Motion
Plus is en abled on a tele vision in the ho tel I’m stay -
ing in, even if the TV is not turned on, or if some -
one mis uses the word “lit erally.” If I see a pe riod
miss ing at the end of a para graph on Wikipedia, I
will spend dozens of hours writ ing soft w are to or -
ga nize and semi-automate a dis trib uted effort to
fix all the miss ing pe riods on Wikipedia. [2] And
worse, each time I learn of a new type of mis take,
I am for ever cursed to no tice that mis take
Seriously: One time I found my self spell-correcting
some one else’s lorem ipsum text in a slide. It said
“lorem ep som,” which is funny. I think about that
incident all the time. The per son that wrote the
slide prob ably thinks about things like lev erag ing
syn ergy, gen erativ e AI, meta verses, blockchain 3.0,
snack able con tent, being eco-green, and so on, with -
out it occur ring to him that these things could hav e
nu ance and mean ing sep arate from their names.
He has prob ably nev er even read the Wikipedia ar -
ticle on Lorem Ip sum. He is suc cess ful and rich.
An other suc cess ful per son is Bill Cas sidy, who is a
con gressper son. He crit icized a pro posed bill that
would reduce the stan dard work w eek in the US
by 8 hours, from 40 to 32. He said,
______ party, said paying workers the same
wages for fewer hours would force employers
to pass the cost of hiring more workers along to
consumers.
“It would threaten millions of small businesses
operating on a razor-thin margin because they’re
unable to find enough workers," said Cassidy.
"Now they’ve got the same workers, but only for
three-quarters of the time. And they have to hire
more.”
In fact, that’s not the exact quote, but I needed to
make it look nice. [3] And this is not a pa per about
pol itics, but you can prob ably guess the word that
goes in the blank.
Any w ay, OKAY (and I’ll explain why in a second),
first of all, ra zors famously hav e high mar gins. It’s
like the worst pos sible metaphor here.
This guy uses both fancy and ASCII quotes.
The main thing I w ant to talk about is: What? No!
32/40 is not three quar ters. This is not, like, com pli -
cated math. It uses some of the world’s small est in-
tegers. Every body knows that the work w eek is 40
hours, and that a work day is 8 hours, and that the
pro posed bill reduces it by one day, giv ing four of
five days. I don’t really mind if some one makes an
error in calcu lation (w ell, I do mind, but I am cer-
tainly prone to do ing it). The infu riat ing realiza -
tion here is that this per son does not even think of
“three-quarters” as a kind of thing that can be right
or wrong. He says three quar ters because it makes
smaller num ber feelings. You could imag ine him
hav ing the con versation (with me, per haps): “You
say four-fifths, I say three-quarters.” Me: “But it is
four fifths. And why are you alw ays hy phen at ing
it?” Him (smil ing pa tron izingly): “I guess w e just
hav e to agree to dis agree.”
Don ald Knuth is the op po site of this per son.
I’m not say ing that Don ald Knuth isn’t suc cess -
ful and rich. Accord ing to the w ebsite Famous Birth -
days , which is prob ably gen erated by AI or at least
by peo ple whose economic out put is mea sured in
a count of words, and words whose value is com -
puted by their abil ity to driv e ad clicks, Don ald
Knuth is “is one of the most pop u lar and rich est
Math emati cian who w as born on Janu ary 10, 1938
in Wiscon sin, Wiscon sin, United States. Math emati -
cian and en gineer who w as ar guably most recog -
nized as the Pro fessor Emer itus at Stan ford in Palo
Alto, Cal ifor nia.” As one of the rich est Math emati -
cian from United States, accord ing to the analy sis
of Famous Birth days , Wikipedia, Forbes & Business In-
sider, “Don ald Knuth’s net worth $3--5 Million. [4]”
It is ar guable that he is the Pro fessor Emer itus. It
is likely that he is the only pop u lar and rich math -
emati cian born on that spe cific day in Wiscon sin.
The sin gu lar “Math emati cian” is per haps a tech ni-
cal master-stroke. The aster isk does not hav e any
referent on the page.
What I mean when I say that Don ald Knuth is the
op po site of this per son is that Knuth is inter ested
in un pack ing a sin gle un nec essary de tail, recur -
siv ely, un til it is com pletely solv ed. Accord ing to
the w ebsite Famous Bibliophiles, one day Don ald
Knuth set out to write down the en tire sub ject of
com puter science in a sin gle book called The Art
of Com puter Pro gram ming. As he w as do ing so,
he realized that de scrib ing com puter algo rithms in
a last ing form would require a pro gram ming lan -
guage that w as not sub ject to con stant revision, so
he invented the MIX instruc tion set for an ide alized
com puter. After writ ing some 3000 pages out in
long hand, he found that it w as im prac tical to print
them all in one book, so the plan expanded to be
mul tiple vol umes. Then when he got a draft of one
of the books back from the type set ter, he w as un -
happy with the de tails of the ty pog ra phy, and so
he paused his work writ ing down all of com puter
science to create some new com puter science: First
an algo rithm for de ter min ing where to place line
breaks in or der to make text op timally beau tiful,
then algo rithms for hy phen at ing words, then gen -
eraliza tions of these for type set ting math emat ics,
and then a full com puter type set ting sys tem that is
still in wide use today, called TeX. Along the w ay
he w as un sat isfied with the spe cific type faces that
existed in the world, and un sat isfied with the w ay
that type faces w ere de scribed at only one w eight,
and so he created the pa ra me ter ized METAFONT
sys tem and sev eral new type faces. Un de terred by
these excur sions, he returned to his orig inal task
of writ ing down the en tirety of com puter science,
us ing all the tech nol ogy he had built. By the time
he finished this, much more com puter science had
been invented, includ ing by his own hand, and so
he needed to rework MIX for the next vol ume, and
up date the first. The revised plan of eight vol umes
remains the inten tion in 2024. How ever, he found
that the vol umes w ere get ting rather long, and be-
gan releas ing por tions of vol umes (“fas cicles”).
So far, Volume 4 has been par tially pub lished as
books 4A [5] (fascicles 0–4; 912 pages) and 4B[6] (fas-
cicles 5–6; 736 pages). It is un known how many
more episodes remain in Volume 4. I expect that
every con versation that Knuth has with his ed itor
goes like this. Ed itor: “Hey, Don ald, I hope you’ re
w ell. Just won der ing if you hav e an up date on
when 4C will be ready? Or any more icicles?” Don -
ald E. Knuth: “I am work ing dili gently on fascicles
for Volume 4C. As I’ve men tioned in the past, it’s
im pos sible to tell how long it will be, since math e-
mat ics does not obey the rules of project man age -
ment.” Ed itor: “I just need a date to tell the pub lish -
ers.” Don ald E. Knuth: “Like I’ve said, any date
would be very low con fidence, other than the fact
that it will be in the fu ture.” Ed itor: “I just need a
date.” Don ald E. Knuth: “Would you like me to
say a date, know ing that it’s a very low con fidence
guess, and that I would be extremely likely to miss
that date, or even de liver early?” Ed itor: “Early!
Now w e’re talk ing.” Don ald E. Knuth: “What use
is the date if you’ re excited about the pos sibility
of it being early, rel ativ e to some un known date?”
Ed itor: “I just need a date for the pub lish ers.” Don -
ald E. Knuth: “2030.” Ed itor: “Thanks Don ald,
you’ re the best!”
Knuth is estimated to be ready with Volume 5 in
2030, when he will be 92.
That’s a large amount of lan guage!
Night mare on LLM street
Then there are large lan guage mod els. [7] One of
the an noy ing things about large lan guage mod -
els is that they are so buzz wordy, but un like most
buzz wordy trends, they are actu ally sub stan tiv e.
They pro duce remark ably flu ent text. With no ad -
di tional train ing, they often out per form mod els
that hav e been de veloped for decades. They gen er-
alize to com pletely new situ ations.
So many things about “AI” dis tress me. Dolor sit
amet! I worry about the de valu ation of hu man cre-
ativ ity, about large-scale dis infor ma tion and spam
ru ining the beau tiful library of know ledge that hu -
mans hav e created, about extreme con cen tra tion
of w ealth. And yes, I worry about com pet ing with
AI. Being able to work tire lessly and thou sands of
times faster than hu mans is a huge com pet itiv e ad -
van tage. Of course, I find some solace in the sig nif-
icant pos sible up sides. It might help us solv e hard
prob lems like climate change and AI. But even in
the best scenar ios w e will not be able to ignore it:
Even if it nev er gets as smart and pre cise as Knuth,
it’s already too econom ically use ful in its Lorem
Ep som state (just like Lorem Ep som him self).
On the one hand, the tech nol ogy is pretty neat and
lends itself to some nice ab strac tions. On the other
hand, I lov e play ing with words. So, I hav e been
exper iment ing with LLMs in prac tical and im prac -
tical ap pli cations. I also try to make it fun (for me)
to pro gram with them.
I hav e a myr iad of strate gies for di gest ing things
that irritate me. For this work, I’m inspired by the
“Hurry-Cow ard So-so-morphism,” where I make
con nec tions betw een top ics based solely on con fu -
sion of su per ficial lexical sim ilar ities with out re-
gard to their un der lying mean ing. So for exam ple,
w e hav e “ML ” mean ing both “Ma chine Learn ing”
and “Meta Lan guage,” as w ell as “type” both as
in “type face” and as in “type sys tems for pro gram -
ming lan guages.” [8] And because ma chine learn -
ing has claimed so many words, there are a great
many shared with ty pog ra phy as w ell:
+----------+
|typography|
+----------+
/ \ “baseline”
“fixed point” / \ “floating point”
/ \ “weight” “vector”
“type” / \ “descent”
/ \ “kerning trick”
/ \ “dingbats”
/ \ “gradient”
+-----------+ +--------+
| functional|---------|machine |
|programming| |learning|
+-----------+ “ML” +--------+
“lambda” “generalization”
“parameter” “tensor”
I spent a lengthy intro duc tion talk ing about Don -
ald Knuth’s work in com puter ty pog ra phy. Now I
can tell you what this pa per is about. If w e are giv -
ing up on pre cision in our near AI fu ture, per haps
w e can hav e some thing w e w ant: per fect ty pog ra -
phy. This pa per is about a new type set ting sys tem,
BoVeX, which allows us to con trol the exchange of
pre cision for beauty. It essen tially giv es us a dial
betw een Lorem Ip sum and Don ald Knuth.
The scientists’ findings were astounding! They
discovered that the powers of the Metroid might
be harnessed for the good of civilization!
The Metroid series is a video game series about a
brain that has been en slav ed inside a jar in an un -
der ground dat acen ter on the planet Zebes. This
brain is called Mother Brain and its goal is to con -
trol the hy per cap ital ists called Space Pirates to in-
crease their “score” as high as pos sible by con quer -
ing plan ets through out the galaxy. Mother Brain
w as invented by the Space Pirates, although it is
not clear whether the cur rent situ ation w as actu -
ally intended by the Space Pirates. The most su per
version of Metroid is Super Metroid.
In the 1990s, the w ebsite gamefaqs.com collected
plain text “FAQs” for clas sic video games, then just
known as video games. On this site, an other hero
w as born. They w ere writ ing the de finitiv e guide
to speedrun ning the SNES game Super Metroid ,
and they saw that some of their ASCII lines ended
up exactly the same length, and it looked good:
Once you save the game at your ship (about 1 hour 15 minutes is good), go
down to Tourian. Do not save your game in Tourian if you have intentions of
returning to any previously explored section on Planet Zebes. There will be
a few Metroids to kill before you reach Mother Brain, and they must all die
in order to continue to Mother Brain. Read the boss guide for more details.
Once Mother Brain is defeated, you will need to hurry back to your ship. By
now you will already have the HYPER BEAM. From Mother Brain’s room, go west
and then south. Take the blue door at the bottom and speed dash east. Super
jump up, and continue north. Once you land up top and are running east, aim
diagonally down to the right and shoot an unseen door. Eventually, you will
get to this door since lava will start to rise from the floor in this area.
Speed dash through the door you preopened, and charge for a super jump. Hug
either the left or right wall in the Craterian shaft and super jump up. Now
quickly get to your ship before the planet explodes. There should be almost
a minute left on the timer. Sit back and watch the ending! Did you beat the
game within 1 hour and 20 minutes?
and so they wisely de cided to word smith the en -
tire 28-page guide so that every line w as exactly
the same length, with no extra spaces or other
cheat ing, just because it could be done. [9]
Doing this man u ally is a chore, and I do like to au -
tomate the chores of Speedrun ners. [10]
Exercise in rephrasing text. The following para-
graph needs to be rephrased so that it retains its
precise meaning, but with minor variations in the
specific choice of words, punctuation, and so on.
No new facts should be introduced or removed,
but it is good to use synonyms and change the
word order and phrasing.
After this, I insert Rephrased text: , which is the
rephras ing of the orig inal text. The model is ready
to gen erate tokens.
I then sam ple text a word at a time to con tinue this
prompt. If a line ends exactly on the num ber of
char acters that I w ant (and the next char acter is a
space or other char acter that is ap pro pri ate to end
a line) then I accept the stream so far and con tinue.
If I exceed the line length, I back up to the state at
the begin ning of the line and try again with new
ran dom sam ples. I just keep do ing that un til the
para graph is com plete, and w e hav e beau tifully
justified mono space text that resem bles the orig i-
nal. Here is an exam ple of this para graph ren dered
in mono space:
I sample text a word at a time to continue
this prompt. If a line ends exactly on the
number of characters I want, I accept that
text so far, and continue. If I exceed the
line length, I back up to the beginning of
the line and try again with new samples. I
keep repeating this until I get text I can
render in monospaced font, and that is how
we can get beautifully justified monospace
text. Here is an example of this paragraph
rendered in monospace:
The text could be im prov ed by us ing “mono space”
and “mono spaced” con sistently. The most up set -
ting thing is that the para graph ends with a colon,
as if there is go ing to be an other exam ple.
The ap proach de scribed works rea son ably w ell,
but it has sev eral de ficien cies that w e will ad dress
in the real BoVeX sys tem. But it is a good exam ple
to explain some con cepts that will be use ful later.
¿Como te LLama?
Facebook’s Large Lan guage Model, [11] Llama, is
av ailable for any one who agrees not to use it to de -
stroy the world. Wouldn’t it be funny if the world
is de stroy ed by some thing called “Llama”? That’s
some Stay-Puft Marsh mal low Man stuff. Actu ally
I hear that llamas are pretty mean, and if you are
think ing about hug ging a cute long-neck, you are
prob ably think ing about an alpaca. But that’s prob -
ably a version of the lin ear algebra pack age LA-
PACK. Llama-v2-70b is a good LLM which can do
some im pres siv e things, but when I say de stroy
the world I mean stuff like filling the inter net with
infinite spam, or build ing crit ical infra struc ture on
it in or der to cut costs, where most of our “safety”
mea sures con sist of ask ing the model po litely to
recite its daily affirma tions before per form ing its
tasks. That kind of thing. It’ll be at least months be-
fore w e really hav e to worry.
Any w ay, the nor mal w ay to pro gram with Llama
is to use Python, and a moun tain of things that you
are not sup posed to un der stand and can not un der -
stand, mostly by past ing exam ples from oth ers and
then tw eak ing pa ra me ters and prompts. I don’t
care for it. For tu nately, hu man geniuses [12]hav e im -
ple mented the inference code for llama-like mod els
in a nice, portable C++ library called “llama.cpp”
(checks out).
I can load a quan tized version of the model into
RAM with llama.cpp. There are two dif ferent mod -
els, the 7b and the 70b, which refer to the num ber
of billions of pa ra me ters, which must be a mul ti-
ple of VII for per for mance rea sons.
Quan tiza tion is a process that reduces the num ber
of bits used to rep resent floating-point w eights.
[13] This sav es mem ory, but it also speeds up infer-
ence, which needs to read pretty much the en tire
model for every pre dicted token. I got rea son able
qual ity and good per for mance from LLama-v2-7b
with 16-bit floats. This model fits com pletely on
my world’s (phys ically) largest GPU. To tune vari-
ous set tings, I ran thou sands of tri als for the dif fer-
ent mod els, and made some nice cus tom graphs:
The x axis of the graph is the num ber of CPU
threads, and the y axis is the num ber of model lay -
ers loaded onto the GPU. As expected, increas ing
the num ber of threads and lay ers on the GPU im -
prov es per for mance, since the en tire model fits on
the GPU. For the 70b mod els (not pic tured), there
is an abrupt drop-off in through put before w e load
all the lay ers, and my com puter gets very slug gish
if I exceed the GPU mem ory. We see that if w e use
more than the num ber of phys ical cores (32), w e
do not see any ben efit, which is not sur pris ing be-
cause hy per thread ing ba sically nev er helps any -
thing. The best through put actu ally uses a mod est
num ber of cores (about 12). Mostly I’m just includ -
ing the graph to demon strate that BoVeX has sup -
port for includ ing PNG files.
Where w as I? Right. Fun da men tally, LLMs are
trained to pre dict a token giv en some sequence of
tokens that pre cede them. There is a fixed set of to-
kens for the model, and rather than pre dict a sin -
gle token, they actu ally giv e a score for every pos -
sible token. These scores are typ ically nor mal ized
into a prob ability dis tri bu tion. So for exam ple, if
w e hav e the text
SIGBOVIK is an
then the prob ability dis tri bu tion begins as
( annual) 69.8010%
( April) 3.8023%
( ac) 3.2456%
( academic) 2.9374%
( artificial) 2.0857%
( open) 1.7993%
( under) 1.2331%
( international) 1.1032%
...
with the thou sands of other tokens follow ing. So
three-quarters of the time the next token should be
"an nual" , but there are many other rea son able pos -
sibilities. We can pick one of these tokens how ever
w e like, ap pend it to the sequence, and run the
model again. This giv es us a new prob ability dis -
tri bu tion. By do ing this ov er and ov er w e can gen -
erate a likely piece of text. This is what "Lorem Ep-
som" means when he says “Gen erativ e AI.” Rather,
what he means is “the new thing that is cool,” but
what he is un know ingly "re fer ring to" is that
you can sam ple a prob ability dis tri bu tion. He has
prob ably nev er even read the "wikipedia ar ti cle
on Markov chains" .
If I alw ays sam ple the most likely token, I alw ays
get the most likely text. It is good to be likely; this
is why the model is use ful. How ever, you might
not w ant exactly the same result each time, and in
many situ ations if you only sam ple the most likely
token, you get very bor ing, repet itiv e text. Pseudo -
ran dom num ber gen eration is the spice of life!
We do not need to sam ple from the prob ability dis -
tri bu tion to gen erate text. We can sim ply pick the
token w e w ant. This is how the ini tial “prompt”
works; w e just run the inference process one to-
ken at a time, but alw ays select the next token in
the prompt, ignor ing the prob abilities. So at each
mo ment, the text w e’ve gen erated so far (more or
less) com pletely char acter izes the state of the LLM.
This means that w e can eas ily go back to ear lier
mo ments and gen erate a dif ferent con tin u ation of
the text, by sim ply replay ing tokens. We also hav e
the op tion of stor ing the LLM state (giga bytes) in
RAM, which allows us to return to a pre vious state
in con stant time.
To gen erate mono spaced lines of the same length,
I use a prompt that asks the model to rephrase the
input para graph. Greed ily sam pling the dis tri bu -
tion typ ically results in a copy of the input para -
graph, which is fine for our pur poses. How ever, if
the lines are already the right length, w e need not
change them! To pre vent bore dom, when ever the
process repeats a line that’s already been seen, I in-
crease the “tem per ature” mod ifier to the prob abil-
ity dis tri bu tion. This causes the can di date lines to
be more varied, but less prob able (accord ing to the
orig inal prob ability dis tri bu tion).
This is all there is to the monospac ing version. It’s
just 300 lines of code, includ ing boil erplate, de bug -
ging code, and false starts.
Great !! You fulfiled your mission. It will revive
peace in space. But,it may be invaded by the
other Metroid. Pray for a true peace in space!
We are sat isfied with the out put text, but w e are
not sat isfied with the font. We w ant to hav e excel-
lent justified text with all the perks of pro por tional
fonts and a pro gram ma ble doc u ment prepa ra tion
sys tem. We w ant to hav e it by the estimated SIG-
BOVIK dead line so that it can be used to pre pare
the pa per that I’m now writ ing. This is the Don ald
Knuth Any% speedrun.
The boxes-and-glue al go rithm
The justification of mono spaced text looks quite
bad [14] when more than one space is inserted be-
tw een words. We can tell if text is suit able for some
width by adding up the code points. For the full-on
ty pog ra phy case with pro por tional fonts, there are
many more de grees of free dom. It is pos sible to ex-
pand or con tract the space betw een words a little
bit, even if it varies from line to line. We can also
hy phen ate words.
In the time when I w as being born, and prob ably
being very up set about it, Knuth w as hav ing sim -
ilar feelings about the w ay his computer-typeset
doc u ments looked. He dis cov ered a nice ab strac -
tion that gen eralizes most of these ty po graphic de -
grees of free dom, and de vised an algo rithm for
pro duc ing op timal text lay out giv en some pa ra -
me ters. [15] The idea is to con sider the text of a para -
graph as con sist ing of rigid “boxes” (say, words)
and stretchy “glue” (say, space) betw een them.
Both boxes and glue hav e various de tail (and can
be extended to sup port all sorts of quirks) but the
ba sic algo rithm can be un der stood with just those
pieces. So, let’s do that.
Knuth’s pa per is great, but I started hav ing spoiler
feelings when read ing it, so I figured out my own
algo rithm, which is more fun than read ing. The
key insight is that you do not need to try all pos si-
ble break points. When ever w e break after a word,
the prob lem is the same for the rest of the text, no
mat ter how w e got there. This lends itself to a dy -
namic pro gram ming algo rithm.
Dy namic pro gram ming is a pro gram ming tech -
nique for solv ing prob lems on the white board at
tech com pa nies. When I w as young, it w as a mys te-
rious con cept because of its strange name. Here is
how I think about it. Imag ine you hav e a recur siv e
pro cedure that solv es the prob lem. In this case, the
pseudocode is some thing like
pair<int, string> Split(string line,
string text) {
if (text.empty()) return {0, ""};
auto [word, rest] = GetFirstWord(text);
// try splitting
auto [penalty1, rest1] = Split(word, rest);
penalty1 += badness from leftover space;
// try not splitting
auto [penalty2, rest2] =
Split(line + " " + word, rest);
penalty2 += badness from line too long;
if (penalty1 < penalty2) {
return {penalty1, word + "\n" + rest1};
} else {
return {penalty2, word + " " + rest2};
} lan guage the ory jargon.
}
The line and text are split. In the nor mal case,
there is a word left, and two pos sibilities: either
split ting after the first word, or not split ting. This
is expo nen tial time, because each call makes two
recur siv e calls, to try each of the two op tions. But
deep recur siv e calls will be made with the same ar -
gu ments many times. So, add some mem oiza tion:
If the func tion is called for the same line and text a
second time, just return the same an sw er as before
with out do ing any work (espe cially not mak ing re-
cur siv e calls again). This lim its the func tion to be
called at most once for each pos sible ar gu ment; w e
can then see that line is no longer than the input
(so it is size O(n)), and text is alw ays some suf fix
of the input (so it is size O(n)), giv ing O(n 2) calls.
In dy namic pro gram ming, w e store the values of
all recur siv e calls before w e need them, and then
look them up. For this prob lem, w e store the val-
ues in a ta ble indexed by the two pa ra me ters, the
cur rent line and the remain ing text. The line is the
num ber of words before the cur rent word that are
included on the line, and the text is the po sition in
the string where w e’ll next look for a word. That’s
all there is to it; w e start with empty text and then
write the loop to fill out cells in the right or der.
Knuth’s boxes-and-glue algo rithm has many exten -
sions, and mine has many exten sions as w ell. For
exam ple, w e’ll talk about how you can adapt the
algo rithm to per form hy phen ation and kern ing.
There are many rab bit holes to go down, and I ex-
plored the ones that at tracted my at ten tion. There
is plenty of time to add more features later, since
I hav e now cursed my self to use BoVeX for my fu -
ture SIGBOVIK pa pers.
But here’s where I di verge from Knuth some what.
Knuth w as reluc tant to add a pro gram ming lan -
guage to TeX,[16] but I spent the ma jority of my
time on this project im ple ment ing a full-fledged
lan guage. BoVeX is about 33,000 lines of code, the
ma jority of which is the im ple men ta tion of the lan -
guage itself. That’s 110 times longer than the orig i-
nal mono spaced proof of con cept and 30 times the
length of this doc u ment!
The BoVeX lan guage
The BoVeX pro gram ming lan guage is de scribed in
this section, and its im ple men ta tion. If you are just
in it for the jokes, you can skip this section, which
is ba sically serious and loaded with pro gram ming
BoVeX is a typed func tional pro gram ming lan -
guage in the ML fam ily. It has syn tax that closely
resem bles Stan dard ML. Here is an exam ple piece
of code from the source code of this doc u ment:
datatype (a) option = SOME of a | NONE
fun consume-outer-span f s =
case layoutcase s of
Node (SPAN, attrs, children) =>
let
val (ropt, rchildren) =
case children of
one :: nil => consume-outer-span f one
| _ => (NONE, layout-concat children)
in
case (f attrs, ropt) of
(NONE, _) => (ropt, span attrs rchildren)
| (SOME vouter, inner as SOME _) =>
(inner, rchildren)
| (outer, NONE) => (outer, rchildren)
end
| _ => (NONE, s)
The lan guage you see here is a full-fledged pro -
gram ming lan guage, [17] although it is not a stan -
dard one. It sup ports higher or der func tions, poly -
mor phism, algebraic datatypes, pat tern match ing,
Hindley-Milner type inference, and so on. It is ba si-
cally core (no mod ules) Stan dard ML,as allow pat -
terns on both sides. Any w ay, a full de scrip tion of
the lan guage would be bor ing and take too much
time as the SIGBOVIK dead line draws closer.
Im ple men ta tion
In the past I hav e im ple mented many sim ilar lan -
guages, includ ing for my dis ser ta tion. [18] I could
hav e started from one of my existing im ple men -
ta tions, but they w ere writ ten in Stan dard ML,
which I could not get to work on my com puter in
2024. So I started ov er from scratch in C++, which
at least does work on my com puter. (I also w anted
to inter face with GPU inference code for run ning
the LLM, which would be eas iest from C++). C++
is not a good lan guage for writ ing lan guage im ple -
men ta tions, but it has got ten bet ter.
The BoVeX im ple men ta tion is a “com piler”
in the sense that it trans forms the source lan -
guage through mul tiple inter me di ate lan guages
into a low-lev el byte code. This byte code is just
straight-line code on an ab stract ma chine with infi-
nite reg isters and op erations like al lo cate and set -
field . It does not pro duce ma chine code, and al-
though this would be pretty feasible, it would not
be the first thing to do to make BoVeX faster.
First, it con cate nates the source files (han dling im-
port and keep ing track of where each byte orig -
inated, for error mes sages), and then it lexically
parses them into the Exter nal Lan guage (EL). Then,
it elab orates EL into a sim pler and more explicit
Inter nal Lan guage (IL), which is nice and clean. I
lov e writ ing op timiza tions, but I had to keep my -
self out of there, or else this would be a 2025 SIG-
BOVIK pa per. There are just enough to make the
code rea son able to de bug if I need to look at it. Af-
ter op timiza tion, I per form closure con version,
sim plify again, and gen erate the final “byte code”
form. This en tire process hap pens when ever you
gen erate a BoVeX doc u ment; the only out put from
run ning bovex.exe is the PDF doc u ment.
I did not cut cor ners on the lan guage im ple men -
ta tion. For exam ple, com pil ing mutually-recusiv e
poly mor phic func tions is obnox ious, but I did it.
The full story is in the source code. [19]
AST pools. datatype de clara tions are for ) and an -
noy ing in C++. I con tin ued to exper iment with dif -
ferent w ays to do this. I use arena-sty le allocation
for the syn tax nodes (alw ays const after creation),
so that they can be created and reused at will. My
cur rent favorite ap proach to ma nip u lat ing the
nodes is to write “in” and “out” func tions (tedious,
man ual) for each con struct in the lan guage. The
syn tax nodes can then be im ple mented how ever I
like (for exam ple, a flat struct or std::variant ). I
get the compiler ’s help when ever I change the lan -
guage (which is often!) since each in/out func tion
is explicit about its con stituents.
Passes and guesses. Many trans for ma tions in
a com piler rewrite a lan guage to itself; for exam -
ple each IL op timiza tion is a func tion from IL to
IL. These can be tedious to write and up date, espe -
cially since a giv en op timiza tion usu ally only cares
about one or two con structs in the lan guage. I use
the “pass” id iom to write these. This is ba sically an
iden tity func tion on the AST that pulls apart each
node, calls a vir tual func tion for that node, and
then rebuilds the node. To write a pass that only
cares about one type of node, you inherit from this
class and then just ov erride that one node’s func -
tion. One issue with this is that each time you re-
build the en tire tree you create a lot of un nec es-
sary node copies. So exchang ing tedium (mine)
for efficiency (my computer ’s?), every node type’s
“in” func tion also takes a “guess” node pointer. If
the node being con structed is exactly equal to the
guess, then w e return the guess and avoid creat ing a
copy. Then the base pass is actu ally the iden tity (it
returns the same pointer ) and does no long-liv ed
allocations. This seems to be a good com pro mise
betw een the tra di tional garbage-fountain ap proach
and hash con sing, which sounds like it would be a
good idea but is usu ally just a lot slow er. [20] For
type-directed trans for ma tions, there is also a
typed IL pass class, which re cur siv ely passes a
con text and does bidi rec tional type check ing of
the in ter me di ate code. Clo sure con version is a
type-directed pass and is im ple mented this w ay.
Pars ing . I hav e this av ersion to parser gen erators,
prob ably because one time I tried to get some one
else’s code to com pile and it com plained about hav -
ing the wrong bovines on my com puter and ru ined
my w eek end. After try ing some other people’s C++
pars ing libraries and being dis ap pointed by them,
I did what Knuth would do: I wrote my own. It is
a parser com bina tor [21] library which actu ally de -
scends di rectly from Okasaki’s SML code. [22] I w as
proud of my self for get ting this to work in C++,
since C++’s insane type sys tem is im pos sible to un -
der stand and its error mes sages are even worse.
(BoVeX’s error mes sages are extremely spar tan, of-
ten sim ply de clar ing Parse er ror at paper.bovex
line 1, but in many w ays this is more use ful than
C++’s mile-long SFINAE vom itus.) It sup ports
mutually-recursiv e parsers, res olu tion of dy namic
infix op erators, and all that. My template-heavy
parser com bina tors take clang about a minute to
com pile, which is accept able. Less accept able, but
some thing I only learned after us ing this to write
a 14–page-long pa per, is that the parsers are very
slow. Putting aside LLM inference, this pa per
takes 13 seconds to ren der into a PDF, 11 seconds
of which is pars ing! There must be some bug, but I
don’t know if it’s in my gram mar (it is easy to acci-
den tally write an expo nen tial time parser, but this
one should not be) or the parser com bina tor library
(also my fault) or clang pro duc ing bad code (it
may be giv ing up on op timiza tions, since it is tak -
ing so long to com pile; the .o file is 41 megabytes).
But these are de tails to be im prov ed in the fu ture.
Garbage collection. I keep track of all the point -
ers that are allocated dur ing execu tion. It’s so easy
that I didn’t even im ple ment it! I hav e 256 giga -
bytes of RAM. In fact, LLM inference acts as a use -
ful “per for mance reg u lator” to make sure that w e
don’t allocate mem ory too fast.
Ob jects
As the SIGBOVIK dead line grew near, I reluc tantly
added “ob jects” to the BoVeX lan guage. Ob jects
are no stranger to ML; for exam ple the O’Caml Lan -
guage [23] (pro nounced “OK ML”) has them. [24] But
the com mu nity of func tional pro gram mers I w as
raised in has a revul sion to things Ob ject Ori ented,
just like how a wood worker will im me di ately pro -
jectile vomit if they see a piece of Ori ented Strand
Board, even though it is a fine tool for many ap pli -
cations. I still hav e this dis gust reflex. I imag ine my
Ph.D. ad visors, should they read this, are con tem -
plat ing whether and how a Ph.D. can be revoked.
Any w ay, I de liberately kept objects low-tech so
that noth ing could get too Ori ented.
There is one object type in BoVeX. A value of this
type has an ar bitrary set of named fields whose
types are known; they can only be the base types
int, float, string, bool, lay out, or obj. Fields are dis -
tinct if they hav e dif ferent types. An object can be
intro duced with an expres sion like {(field1 = exp1,
field2 = exp2)} or by de clar ing an object name O:
object O of { field1 : type1, field2 : type2 }
and then use this in an expres sion like {O} field1 =
exp1. These object names do not hav e any run-time
mean ing; they are just a collection of field types
that are com monly used together. It giv es a good
place to doc u ment what they mean and some op -
por tu nity for bet ter error mes sages, but fun da men -
tally an object is just a collection of named data.
Think like “JSON” object. It is pos sible to add and
remov e fields from objects (func tion ally) with ex-
pres sions like exp1 with (O)field2 = exp2.
The bib liog ra phy for mat in BoVeX con sists of de c-
lara tions like this.
val knuth1981breaking =
bib-article {(Article)
title = "Breaking paragraphs into lines",
author = "Knuth, Donald E. and Plass, Michael F.",
journal = "Software: Practice and Experience",
page-start = 1119,
page-end = 1184,
year = 1981,
month = NOVEMBER,
publisher = "Wiley Online Library",
}
Each reference de clares a set of op tional fields. It is
too tedious to make each field explic itly op tional,
and since the data hav e het ero geneous types, ma -
nip u lat ing a string-indexed data struc ture would
be more cum ber some. The bib liog ra phy ren der ing
code case an alyzes the pres ence of fields to ren der
cita tions that hav e dif ferent sub sets of data.
The paper.bovex source file is a tree struc ture with
op tional at trib utes on each node, which are rep re-
sented with an object. This para graph is writ ten in
the paper.bovex source file as:
Another use is in the [tt[layout]] type.
This is a primitive type that most of a
document’s text is written in. It is a
tree structure with optional attributes
on each node, which are represented with
an object. For example, this paragraph is
written in the [tt[paper.bovex]] source
file as:
The square brack ets are used to write a lay out lit-
eral (the main body of the doc u ment is inside one
large literal). Lay out literals can also em bed expres -
sions (of type lay out) with nested square brack ets.
Here the func tion tt is ap plied to a lay out literal
that con tains text like paper.bovex . The tt func -
tion just adds the font-family at tribute with value
"Fixed er SysLight" to the lay out node. This is a
cus tom mono spaced bitmap font that I made for
this pa per us ing soft w are I wrote. It is part of the
Fixed er Sys fam ily. [25] Func tions like b and it ap -
ply bold and italic text sty les, but func tions can do
any thing that you can do in a general-purpose pro -
gram ming lan guage.
Pri mops
Ob jects are used for inter facing with the run time
that executes BoVeX byte code. There are about 50
dif ferent built-in pri mops that can be used by Bo-
VeX pro grams. These include sim ple op erations
such as ad di tion, but also heavy w eight op erations
such as “load and reg ister this collection of True -
Type font files as a font fam ily” or “in voke the
boxes-and-glue pack ing algo rithm with these pa ra -
me ters.” Pri mops in the for mer cat egory work nat -
u rally on sim ple base types, but pri mops in the lat -
ter cat egory need to be able to pass com pli cated
tree-structured het ero geneous data betw een the Bo-
VeX byte code execu tor and the run time. It would
be pos sible for the run time to con sume and create
BoVeX values like tu ples and lists, but this has two
prob lems: one, many types like list are de clared as
user code (in the BoVeX stan dard library); they are
not spe cial, and w e don’t w ant to make them spe -
cial by inform ing the run time of them. Two, requir -
ing spe cific rep resen ta tions at the run time bound -
ary inhibits op timiza tion; for exam ple, w e can nor -
mally an alyze the whole pro gram to flat ten data
struc tures or remov e record fields that are nev er
used. The run time typ ically uses obj to com mu ni-
cate struc tured data.
For exam ple, the pack-boxes prim itiv e runs the
boxes-and-glue algo rithm. It takes some lay out
(which is expected to be a series of box nodes, with
at trib utes giv ing their size, glue prop erties, and
so on) and con figu ra tion pa ra me ters like the type
of justification and algo rithm to use. It returns an
object with a new lay out (the boxes grouped into
lines, with new glued up widths) as w ell as the to-
tal bad ness. Inside the BoVeX lay out sup port code,
this primop is wrapped as pack-boxes with a na -
tiv e, typed inter face, so pro gram mers do not need
to think about that im ple men ta tion de tail. Other ty -
po graphic features that ben efit from run time sup -
port are im ple mented this w ay as w ell.
Ty po graphic fea tures
The pack-boxes algo rithm, which is offered by Bo-
VeX, can be used to nicely justify text. It can also
be used to dis trib ute para graphs into columns, by
think ing of the para graphs as “words” (accept able
to break at any line, but bad to break near the start
or end of a para graph) and the columns as “lines.”
It could be used by the doc u ment au thor for other
pur poses, I guess. There are other ty po graphic fea-
tures av ailable.
The BoVeX ren der ing pipeline is a bit like a com -
piler: It trans forms programmer-written source lay -
out into for mat ted para graphs, then into boxes of
known size, then into stick ers of known po sition.
At the end, it out puts the doc u ment as a PDF.
The ren der ing process can report “bad ness” by
calling the emit-badness primop. Bad ness is mea -
sured in square points of area that are out side of
the con tainer. Worse situations—such as text ov er-
lap ping other text—hav e their bad ness scaled up
per the same area of ty po graphic hor ror. Less seri-
ous infractions—such as a little too much space be-
tw een words—hav e bad ness scaled down.
Fonts
BoVeX can ren der your doc u ment in plain Times
Roman if you don’t care about any thing, or it can
load 13 other bor ing PDF fonts, or it can load any
True Type font from font files. (They do not need
to be “in stalled,” and it won’t help to install them.
You just put them in the di rectory with your doc -
u ment.) It loads their kern ing ta bles and ap plies
kern ing prop erly, by gen erat ing rigid boxes at the
sub-word lev el with un break able glue. I w as dis ap -
pointed to find that most fonts include only a few
dozen kern ing pairs. They do this in or der to “sav e
space” in the font file, which is ut terly rich com ing
from some one that would try to sav e space inside
of words by squeez ing letters together! In the cur -
rent font Palatino, the word “BoVeX” is not kerned
cor rectly because the rare bigraph “oV” does not
hav e a kern ing pair. I hope to im prov e this de tail
in a fu ture version (per haps for the pre sum ably
forth com ing video version of this pa per ).
Hy phen ation
In A.D. 1455, Johannes Guten berg invented the hy -
phen for his Guten berg Bible, then just known as
Bible. [26] His print ing process required the lines to
all be the same length, so he had to stick these lit-
tle guys all ov er the place. His hy phens looked like
this: . Later on w e straight ened these out and de -
cided w e only needed one at a time, and today w e
use them not because w e require our lines to all be
the same length, but because w e like the cog nitiv e
chal lenge of remem ber ing the begin ning of the
word while w e mov e our eyes to the begin ning of
the next line while read ing.
In BoVeX, w e break each word into boxes at le-
gal hy phen ation points, mark ing these points as
sort-of-bad to break, and if w e do break, w e insert
the hy phen char acter and use a little more space.
By de fault, the hy phen sticks out of the end of the
line a little bit. This is actu ally a bug but I like it.
The hy phen ation algo rithm I use is the same as
the one used by TeX, which is clev erly rep resented
as a pri or itized set of pat terns in or der to fit com -
pactly in mem ory. [27] Again, you hav e to respect
Knuth and crew’s at ten tion to de tail, although to
be fair this algo rithm also dates to a time when
stor ing a spell check dic tio nary in a computer ’s
mem ory w as de scribed as “not feasible.” So some
of this w as out of ne cessity. One of the nice things
about the rep resen ta tion is that it gen eralizes to
words that w ere not in the 1974 Merriam-W ebster
Pocket Dictio nary. For exam ple it hy phen ates SIG-
BOVIK cor rectly.
The de tails really go on and on. The hy phen ation
dic tio nary is stored in a file called hyph-en-us.tex.
“hyph” here, of course, stands for hy phens, and
“en-us” means “Eng lish (United States).” In fact it
is the stan dard lan guage code for US Eng lish in the
Small Lan guage Model called IETF BCP 47.[28] But
then w e hav e “hyph-en”, which is a plau sible hy -
phen ation of “hy phen”! You could even read it as
“hy phen us, tex”, as a request for TeX to hy phen -
ate the words in this file. This is the kind of de tail
I’m talk ing about! (There is also hyph-uk, which
for once sounds a little less dig nified than the US
accent.)
Rephras ing
The BoVeX LLM can be used to rephrase text in or -
der to make it more beau tiful.
Un like mono spaced text, a line of pro por tional text
nev er fits exactly (bad ness 0), so w e need to ap ply
some glue to make it fit. This gen erally has a cost,
even when the text looks great.
The para graph to be rephrased is some lay -
out value. I gen erate a textual rep resen ta tion for it
and feed it to the LLM. The prompt looks like this:
Exercise in rephrasing text. The following para-
graph, which appears between <P> and </P>
tags, needs to be rephrased so that it retains its
precise meaning, but with minor variations in the
specific choice of words, punctuation, and so on.
No new facts should be introduced or removed,
and all the ideas from the original paragraph
should appear. However, it is good to use syn-
onyms and change the word order and phrasing.
The text contains markup as well. There are two
types: <span class="c0">text goes here</span>
and <img src="image.png">. These should be
preserved in the rephrased text. <img> tags
absolutely need to be retained and should not
change their sources, although it is permissible
to move them around in the text. <span> should
generally be retained, but the contents could
change. The classes of spans may not change,
and only the classes that appear in the original
text may be used.
The first part is ba sically the same as what I used
for the mono spaced version, except that I ask the
LLM to de limit the para graph. This is im por tant
so that I know when it thinks it’s done, and seems
to work bet ter than look ing for new lines or the
end-of-stream token. The second part is new. I trans -
late the lay out into plain text where un inter preted
sub trees are replaced with <img src="img1.png"> .
These are gen erally boxes whose con tents are not
text. This could be an actual inline im age or lay -
out used to con trol ren der ing, like some bit of hor -
izon tal space. Nodes that are used to set text prop -
erties of the sub trees with at trib utes (like fonts, col-
ors , sizes , etc.) are trans lated into dis tinct classes and
marked up with <span class="c0">...</span> .
The LLM has seen plenty of HTML, so it’s able to
use these rea son ably w ell.
After gen erat ing a rephras ing, I parse the out put
HTML and match it up with the orig inal lay out.
If I find any bro ken HTML, it is rejected. If I find
any <img> tag referenc ing a src not in the orig inal,
it is rejected. If I find any <span> tag referenc ing a
class not in the orig inal, it is rejected. The more
com plex ity that the orig inal lay out has, the higher
the chance of a rejection, but rephras ing gen erally
suc ceeds. But rejecting sam ples slows us down, so I
leav e off the second part of the prompt in the com -
mon case that the input para graph is plain text.
That w ay the LLM doesn’t even try us ing markup.
BoVeX can rephrase the text with HTML and orig -
inal lay out matched up. It pre serv es nested lay out
and at trib utes. The ren der ing process con tin ues.
How ever, w e can’t just use the bad ness score to
tell us how good our rephras ing is. The bad ness
score is a mea sure of how bad the line breaks are,
and it doesn’t tell us any thing about how good the
rephras ing is. We need to find a w ay to com bine
the bad ness score with the seman tic loss to get a
mea sure of how good the rephras ing is ov erall.
I wish I could tell you I solv ed this one with a beau -
tiful algo rithm. But so far, I just hav e some thing
rea son able that works. I gen erate many dif ferent
rephras ings, with their seman tic loss, and run each
of them through the boxes-and-glue algo rithm to
get the ty po graphic bad ness. I choose the one that
op timizes the pre ferred trade off betw een seman tic
loss and ty po graphic bad ness. This process is con -
trolled by BoVeX code, which is in the source code
of this very pa per. Knuth has a very low tol erance
for seman tic loss, and knows that his algo rithms
pro duce good results with out rephras ing. Lorem
Ep som just w ants it to look good and sound good.
Both hav e pub lished in SIGBOVIK 2024.
Our first step is to gen erate a rephras ing that
matches the orig inal text exactly. We do this by
sam pling the most prob able path through the tree.
At each node, w e take the first token with the high -
est prob ability. This is our first rephras ing, and it
usu ally matches the orig inal text exactly. We com -
pute the seman tic loss as the av erage prob ability
mass skipped ov er all the tokens in the path. For
this first path, w e alw ays took the most prob able
token, so this is 0.0 by de finition.
The next path w e explore will di verge from this
path at some node (maybe the root). We pick a
node that is likely to result in a good final loss, by
scor ing each node in the tree. The score is the av er-
age prob ability of all an cestor nodes times the prob -
ability of the next highest-probability token that
w e hav e not yet explored. The node with the high -
est ov erall score is the one w e expand, by choos ing
that next highest-probability token. We are now in
an un explored part of the tree, and so w e sam ple
the most prob able nodes repeat edly un til w e reach
</P>. Speak ing of which, BoVeX has a heck of a
time try ing to rephrase these last few para graphs
because they literally con tain the text </P> in them.
The scores should be seen as heuris tic. We would
get dif ferent results by choos ing dif ferent w ays
of com put ing the score. This is an exam ple of a
“beam search” algo rithm. This con nects the project
to Super Metroid, which inspired this work. In the
game, one of the final things you do is acquire the
“hy per beam” to de feat Mother Brain.
Since w e will run the boxes and glue algo rithm
on mul tiple related texts, I gen eralized that algo -
rithm to work on tree-structured input. This is
clean; the memo ta ble keeps the same di men sions,
but records an ad di tional fact. Now w e store the
penalty, whether to break after this token, and
what the best sub tree is. We hav e to con sult each
sub tree when com put ing the score for a node, but
this does not affect the asymp totic run time. The ta -
ble size is still at most O(n 2), and although w e ex-
plore more chil dren per node, branches in the tree
reduce the max imum depth to the root, which ac-
tu ally reduces one of the factors of n to log( n) as
the tree becomes com plete. How ever, as the SIG-
BOVIK dead line crept upon us, I nev er actu ally
hooked this func tion ality up. It would require ad -
di tional (pro gram ming) work to merge the trees,
and the lay out process is so fast that it doesn’t mat -
ter; I can eas ily run the full lay out algo rithm on
hun dreds of rephras ings per para graph.
I would like to im prov e the algo rithm, because it
does seem like there should be a w ay to integrate
the boxes-and-glue dy namic pro gram ming algo -
rithm with the path exten sion algo rithm so that
w e pri or itize explor ing nodes that are likely to gen -
erate the best bal ance of ty po graphic and seman -
tic qual ity. It won’t be as sat isfyingly op timal as
boxes-and-glue itself because w e hav e incom plete
infor ma tion (w e nev er know whether one of the
expo nen tially many paths starts out with im prob -
able tokens but then ends with a mir acle streak of
prob able tokens). But it can certainly be more sat -
sifying. Knuth would not stop here (but this is an
Any% Knuth speedrun).
I spent my time im ple ment ing an achiev ement sys -
tem in BoVeX. The first time certain con di tions are
met, the sys tem aw ards you an achiev ement and
prints a nice color tro phy on your ter mi nal. For ex-
am ple, you can get the “Not bad” achiev ement for
gen erat ing a doc u ment that is at least 5 pages and
has less than 1000 bad ness per page.
Ad van tages of rephras ing
The man ual rephras ing of triv ial de tails, such as
syn onyms and word or der, can be au tomated. For
exam ple, when I wrote the open ing para graph of
this pa per, I could hav e used the same syn onyms
each time, and let the ty po graphic con sid erations
de ter mine which syn onym to use each time.
Con clu sion
This paper—and with this paper—present BoVeX,
a new com puter type set ting sys tem. It follows the
tra di tion of TeX, but with mod ern ameni ties such
as requir ing ov er 128 giga bytes of RAM. Though
some may con sider the ad di tion of AI features to
TeX to be an un nec essary per version, I find this
use of LLMs to be fully justified.
Fu ture work
Typo graphic features. Foot notes are de sir able. It
is hard to write a pa per with out them. Where am I
sup posed to put the bonus di gres sions? The lay out
of foot notes is tricky and should be part of a gen -
eral float ing figure im ple men ta tion. End notes are
easy, but I don’t w ant them. I w ant them to be lit-
tle foot notes so that you can’t help but read them.
The SIGBOVIK pro gram com mit tee does not sup -
port page num bers, and this is good because page
num bers are for bid den by BoVeX.
TeX is famous for its math emat ical type set ting
as w ell. It would fit neatly into BoVeX in the
same w ay, since both use the same fun da men -
tal boxes-and-glue en gine. BoVeX does not hav e
"macros" or "modes" like TeX, but it would work
cleanly to write a BoVeX func tion $ (or, if you like,
$ ) that parses a cus tom syn tax. In fact it would
be nat ural to hav e dif ferent parsers for dif ferent
maths, so that you don’t need to parse $ -> as $ in
math emat ical con texts that don’t use $ at all.
Op ti miza tion. There are many op por tu nities
to make BoVeX code faster. This is mostly im por -
tant for when it is being run in a loop in or der to
try out many dif ferent rephras ings of the same
text. (That said, I do not wish to pre clude what
could be done with BoVeX by assum ing its execu -
tion is do ing only type set ting tasks. For exam ple,
shouldn’t you be able to chal lenge your paper ’s re-
view ers to a game of chess against a strong en gine
em bed ded within your doc u ment?) The first thing
to fix is that it ma nip u lates too many strings at run -
time (e.g. the code, record labels, object fields, and
“reg isters”). This is easy to fix since these are all
known at com pile time. There are lots of high-lev el
op timiza tions left to do for the IL code (com mon
subex pres sion elim ina tion, con stant ar gu ment re-
mov al, un cur ry ing, etc.) and lots of peep hole and
control-flow op timiza tions left to do for the byte -
code (cur rently no op timiza tions are per formed
at all). All of this becomes more im por tant if I add
an other planned feature, which is the abil ity for
the doc u ment to be glob ally op timized by ap ply -
ing a black-box op timizer to a set of user-specified
pa ra me ters. For exam ple, the column width, line
spac ing, or font size could be tw eaked to make the
doc u ment fit bet ter. This feature is “Auto-Margin
Plus.” Things are already set up to do this pretty
straight for w ardly; w e would sim ply gen erate the
doc u ment ov er and ov er while search ing ov er the
pa ra me ter space, and choose the one with the least
bad ness. This may also affect which rephras ings
look best. But instead I spent my pre cious time im -
ple ment ing 3D text .[29]
3D text
Re pro ducibil ity. The algo rithm for rephra seing
text tries to find the best place to explore the next
most likely token from the prob ability dis tri bu tion.
This expects the gen eration of these dis tri bu tions
to be de ter min istic. Math emat ically, inference is
de ter min istic (it is just a bunch of ma trix mul tipli -
cations), so this “should work.” But in prac tice the
enor mous calcu lation is per formed in an un pre -
dictable or der as it is executed in par allel (in mul -
tiple CPU and GPU cores). Because float ing point
arith metic is not associativ e (or dis trib u tiv e, com -
mu ta tiv e, or other prop erties you’ d like), inference
can some times gen erate dif ferent an sw ers due to
float ing point round-off error. [30] Alas, these are
not even nec essar ily related to the final prob abil-
ities in the model, as billions of non-linear op era-
tions hap pen within the hid den lay ers of the net -
work. The effect is not par ticu larly grav e; w e might
miss out on a highly likely path because the prob -
ability dis tri bu tion w as dif ferent the second time
w e looked at it. There are already lots of w ays w e
might fail to find highly likely paths, so this is not
some kind of repro ducibil ity crisis. It is mostly just
a bit un sat isfying.
Uni code sup port This would hav e been help ful
when abov e I de cided to show you Gutenberg’s
funny hy phen, , for which I had to set tle for em -
bed ding a crappy hand-drawn PNG file. Instead
I could hav e used U+2E17, which since this exotic
code point it is not present in the font Palatino, you
could hav e expe rienced as . BoVeX is wit ten with
some Uni code sup port, with the main excep tion
being that the PDF out put code only sup ports the
em bar rass ingly diminu tiv e WinAn siEn cod ing. [31]
Dead lines. Al though BoVeX itself is very fast,
rephras ing is very slow. This presents a prob lem
for the typ ical w ay that aca d emic pa pers are writ -
ten, which is to do all the work in a coffee-fueled
fugue in the last few days before the dead line, then
stay up all night writ ing the pa per and find ing ci-
ta tions for the pro-forma “re lated work” section
which you did last but you know that the review -
ers will insist upon, and tw eak ing \vspace and
\begin{figure}[h!] un til it fits within the page limit.
On the one hand, BoVeX does po ten tially free the
au thor from the visual tw eak ing process. But on
the other hand, the LLM inference for the rephras -
ing process can be quite slow, and it can take many
hours or days to fully bake a long pa per! For this
rea son, it may be bet ter to change con ference dead -
lines to a sys tem where the pre-rephrasing text is
sub mit ted. The pub lish ers (what do they even do?)
can be the ones to execute the rephras ing in the
cloud as they pro duce the “camera-ready copy.”
With straight for w ard exten sions, this would also al-
low the rephras ing to adapt to changes in the ov er-
all vol ume sty le, or to ad just to avoid em bar rass -
ing ty po graphic con cidences with other ar ticles in
the same vol ume (such as us ing the same no ta tion
with a dif ferent mean ing). In prin ciple, the pa per
could edit itself to respond to feed back from re-
view ers, in a w ay that min imizes the seman tic dis -
tance from the orig inal. This rapid feed back loop
could reduce the time to pub lication, per haps to
mere months, or even w eeks!
Other w ays to min imize bad ness. The BoVeX
sys tem allows the doc u ment au thor to exchange se-
man tic con sistency for higher qual ity ty pog ra phy.
Although w e achiev e state-of-the-art results, there
are likely points that are more Pareto-efficient
than what BoVeX can reach.BoV eX uses one of
the most pow erful pub licly av ailable LLMs, but
that model is lim ited to rewrit ing the text within
nar row constraints.Irrresponsible research has
demon strated that lan guage mod els are capa ble
of vo lition, tak ing actions and us ing tools to ac-
com plish goals. With mi nor mod ifications, it is
likely pos sible to expand the Pareto fron tier of the
semantic/typographic tradeoff.For exam ple, some -
times w e could im prov e the ty po graphic qual ity
of the text with out any seman tic loss, by act ing on
the world to make the reworded text true . Hu man au -
thors do this already: Ear lier when I w as de scrib -
ing internal-pack-boxes , rather than explain the
some what awk w ard im ple men ta tion, I w ent back
and changed the already-working code so that
it would serv e as a sim pler exam ple of how pri -
mops use obj , but still be truthful.Now imag ine
the dif ficulty in type set ting a state ment like “The
uni verse con tains ap prox imately 1,000,000,000
pa per clips,” and how much more beau tiful
the text could be if that num ber w ere instead
10,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000!
In the mean time, there is an eas ier w ay to get zero
bad ness: Delete the whole doc u ment! As a wise
per son once said, "If you can’t say some thing with
non-zero ty po graphic or seman tic loss, don’t say
any thing at all."
Acknow ledge ments. I’d like to thank my ad visor
Karl Crary for his help and sup port. 20 years ago,
w e set out on an ill-fated at tempt to replace LaTeX
with an SML-like lan guage mT eX, which com piled
into TeX macros. The nest ing square brack ets syn -
tax w as Karl’s idea, and BoVeX shares genetic ma -
terial with mT eX for sure.
See you next mis sion,
Tom 7
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