An adaptive learning solution to the keyboard optimization problem

The authors consider the problem of assigning more than one symbol of a finite alphabet A to the same key on a keyboard. Since multiple symbols of the alphabet A reside on the same key, the representations of all the words in a finite dictionary H need not be unique. The problem is one of optimally assigning the symbols of the alphabet to the keys of a given keyboard with a view to minimize the total number of words that have ambiguous representation. The problem is proven to be NP-hard. After presenting the only reported solution to the problem, a fast learning-automaton-based solution to this problem is reported. Experimental results demonstrating the power of this solution are presented