A New Layout for English Letters on the Keyboard Using Evolutionary Strategy

Abstract

Since the keyboard is the primary device of entering text into a computer, a keyboard with letters on the proper layout of high performance is essential. Obtaining a suitable arrangements for the letters on the keyboard is an optimization problem which different methods have been proposed to solve it and its answer is the most appropriate permutation for letters on the keyboard which is 26 letters for English keyboard. In this paper, a new English keyboard layout has been proposed using evolutionary strategy which aims to increase typing speed and rectify some problems of current layout. To this end, a fitness function is used which includes parameters such as keys distance, fingers switch, frequency of use of both hands and etc. Different experiments have been conducted to evaluate the proposed approach and the results indicate that the obtained layout acts better than the current and other proposed layouts in the literature.

Keywords

• Evolutionary computing
• evolutionary strategy
• genetic algorithm
• keyboard layout
• keyboard