1. The machine method of character recognition comprising the steps of thinning, under control of said machine, a character to be recognized to produce a line drawing or skeleton and storing said thinned character in said machine, traversing, under control of said machine, said thinned character using a set of traversing rules and controlling said machine to derive, during said traversing, a name, the individual letters of which represent the various physical directions traversed, machine comparing said derived name to a dictionary of names stored in said machine to determine the stored name that most closely resembles the derived name thereby determining the identity of the character that has been traversed, said dictionary containing a single stored name for each possible character, said comparing step includes the steps of subdividing said dictionary of stored names into at least one subdictionary of letter strings each of said letter strings having as a first letter the same letter as the first letter of said derived name, and examining said subdictionary for matches between particular letters of said derived name and particular letters of one of said subdictionary letter strings.
1. The machine method of character recognition comprising the steps of thinning, under control of said machine, a character to be recognized to produce a line drawing or skeleton and storing said thinned character in said machine, traversing, under control of said machine, said thinned character using a set of traversing rules and controlling said machine to derive, during said traversing, a name, the individual letters of which represent the various physical directions traversed, machine comparing said derived name to a dictionary of names stored in said machine to determine the stored name that most closely resembles the derived name thereby determining the identity of the character that has been traversed, said dictionary containing a single stored name for each possible character, said comparing step includes the steps of subdividing said dictionary of stored names into at least one subdictionary of letter strings each of said letter strings having as a first letter the same letter as the first letter of said derived name, and examining said subdictionary for matches between particular letters of said derived name and particular letters of one of said subdictionary letter strings. 2. The invention set forth in claim 1 wherein said traversing rules comprise the machine steps of determining a node at the lower left corner of said character, determining at said node a next adjacent branch of said character, and traversing said character along said branch of said character starting from said node and moving along said branch.