This was painful to read. It become better and simpler with a basic signals & systems background:
- His breaking up images into grids was a poor-man's convolution. Render each letter. Render the image. Dot product.
- His "contrast" setting didn't really work. It was meant to emulate a sharpen filter. Convolve with a kernel appropriate for letter size. He operated over the wrong dimensions (intensity, rather than X-Y)
- Dithering should be done with something like Floyd-Steinberg: You spill over errors to adjacent pixels.
Most of these problems have solutions, and in some cases, optimal ones. They were reinvented, perhaps cleverly, but not as well as those standard solutions.
Bonus:
- Handle above as a global optimization problem. Possible with 2026-era CPUs (and even more-so, GPUs).
- Unicode :)
He didn't win it. It was won by a team of students / collaborators / mentees, who felt he deserved it. I can't disagree with them. Among the nicest people in the world.
I don't think anyone meant it in the sense of "You're a Nobel Prize Winner," so much as "We couldn't have done this without your mentorship, and you deserve to hold onto this." He certainly doesn't consider himself to be a Nobel Prize winner.