Consider loosening restrictions on stroke order and direction

[Kronopath]

One of the biggest stumbling blocks for new users is the fact that in Chalktalk, stroke order and direction matters, and if you draw a sketch that looks like, say a pendulum, but you do it with the wrong stroke order, you end up with a completely different-looking sketch instead.

We can easily loosen these restrictions. When sketches are loaded, rather than just adding their strokes to the recognizer, Chalktalk could also generate every possible variation of the strokes (different orders, different directions) and recognize based on those as well. This would be a relatively simple way of removing one of the bigger stumbling blocks that new Chalktalk users have with the system.

In doing so, we'd have to address the issue that certain sketches would have to be changed for being too similar to each other (such as the handful of sketches that are shaped like a circle, or the two speaker-shaped audio sketches).

Note that stroke count would still matter, and this is necessary because stroke count is used to narrow down the number of sketches that a freehand drawing could possibly be (making recognition much more efficient).

[Linchy]

Thinking about this a different way, when you look at a drawing you can't tell the stroke order, but you can fit one to it in your 'minds eye'. So could the software work this way too? Given a template with a stroke order, try to fit that order to the users sketch? Instead of solely relying on the users stroke order.