Subject: A Chinese Keyboard Question

From: "L.S.Ng" <[email-masked]>
Date: Mon, 17 May 1993 14:04:32 BST

A Chinese Keyboard Question
---------------------------

A new keyboard layout for a Chinese Script had been designed and used for
sometime. It was found to have the following frequency distribution:

Key            Relative Frequency
m              4669
i              3632
h              3470
o              3346
l              2476
n              2453
y              2207
k              2092
b              1913
p              1840
d              1803
r              1788
a              1662
s              1497
g              1488
q              1481
u              1381
t              1319
v              1304
j              1224
e              1112
f              1041
w              906
c              840
x              188
z              2

'a' to 'z' denote the usual position of a standard QWERTY keyboard.
The numbers associated with each key is the relative frequency.

Problem: It can be seen that the layout was not ergonomically
optimized:
1) The left-hand and right-hand workload were not balanced.
2) The frequently-hit keys did not fall into the most comfortable
places.

A solution is therefore wanted to remap or redesign the keyboard
layout so that it has a optimized ergonomic design.

A notation is suggested when answering:

m->J
y->S
....
where lowercase letters denote the original positions and the
uppercase letter denote the position in the new design.

(This question was taken from a analysis on Chinese typewriting. It
had been simplified by taking away some unrelated technical and
linguistic details for the purpose of this question. The aim is to
present you a purely mathematical/design problem. Please feel free
to post to any newsgroup/mailing-list/interest group and reply to
Liangsheng Wu <[email-masked]>. This question was
originally put up to The Chinese Computing Network List CCNET-
[email-masked])

(A more comprehensive report on the analysis will be posted to
CCNET-L soon.)

Thanks for your attention.

Sincerely
Liangsheng Wu
Southampton UK