a day ago
- The author was frustrated by typos that result in valid words, which spellcheckers miss, e.g., 'love' vs 'live' due to adjacent keys on QWERTY.
- A keyboard layout was optimized using simulated annealing to minimize the number of 'valid typos'—words differing by one letter on adjacent keys.
- Out of 668 words with at least one valid typo, the optimizer found solutions with as few as 102 typos, though many local optima exist.
- The code assumes all typos are equally likely, but suggestions for improvement include weighting by finger typing frequency and modeling multi-typo probabilities.
- Future work could combine typo minimization with typing speed optimization (e.g., Dvorak) to create a Pareto frontier, and use larger word datasets for accuracy.