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    How far can our minds go?

    • Started by sensille
    • 6 Replies:
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    • Registered: 12-Jan-2009
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    15-Jan-2009 15:41:34#1 How far can our minds go?

    Hi,

    I'm new to this forum and quite new to the idea of developing one's own layout, but I really like the idea. Some years ago I started to learn dvorak and used it exclusively in my chat-window while maintaining qwerty on all other windows. The main reason behind this is that I never got used to using dvorak in vi. Two years ago I abandoned dvorak, but the inefficiency of qwerty is still nagging on me. That's why I found my way to this great forum.
    While reading all these threads about 'same finger' and 'rolls' I realized how limited the number of keys in a comfortably reachable position really is and how vain the efforts are to find a layout that is _really_ fast.
    So I came up with a really weird idea, just the right one for a first post ;-)
    What's limiting us is the physical speed of our fingers, not our minds. Every time you have to move your fingers to a hard-to-reach key, or have to use the same finger twice, your speed get's a penalty you can not make up for. How good would it be to have all the keys in the home row and never use the same finger twice?
    Ok, fasten your seat belts. What we need is a context sensitive layout. We always look at the distribution of characters in a given language, but we only look at the overall distribution. The distribution of characters following e.g. 'A' is significantly different from the distribution following 'B'. We partly take this into account by looking at trigrams. But how would it be to have the layout depend on the key pressed before? We would have n different layouts. This would enable optimizations far beyond imagining. Done right you'd hardly have to leave the home row at all and nearly never use the same finger twice, not even for a repeated character.
    Of course this would be _really_ hard to learn, but if you master it all other geeks will look to you in awe. This will push our physical limits. The mind will catch up, that I'm sure of.
    To make it a bit easier, one might want to group keys/layouts so not to have a different layout for each typed key, but only a smaller number, maybe two or three. This might give most of the rewards and be still manageable.

    Also, even the optimization problem might be worth a PhD thesis ;-)

    So, who'll take up the challenge?

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    • Registered: 17-Mar-2008
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    15-Jan-2009 16:05:11#2 Re: How far can our minds go?

    Your premise is almost without doubt incorrect. The mind is what is the limiting factor for all usable layouts; The chief quality of better layouts is that they are less strenuous. There is even a famous quote by Frank McGurrin, the first known touch typist:

    Let an operator take a new sentence and see how fast he can write it. Then, after practicing the sentence, time himself again, and he will find he can write it much faster: and further practice on the particular sentence will increase the speed on it to nearly or quite double that on the new matter. Now let the operator take another new sentence, and he will find his speed has dropped back to about what it was before he commenced practicing the first sentence. Why is this? The fingers are capable of the same rapidity. It is because the mind is not so familiar with the keys.

    Hence, knock yourself out, but I think your efforts will be wasted.

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    • From: Houston, Texas
    • Registered: 03-Jan-2007
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    15-Jan-2009 17:11:44#3 Re: How far can our minds go?
    sensille said:

    Of course this would be _really_ hard to learn, but if you master it all other geeks will look to you in awe. This will push our physical limits. The mind will catch up, that I'm sure of.
    To make it a bit easier, one might want to group keys/layouts so not to have a different layout for each typed key, but only a smaller number, maybe two or three. This might give most of the rewards and be still manageable.

    Also, even the optimization problem might be worth a PhD thesis ;-)

    So, who'll take up the challenge?

    Only the truly insane.  All other geeks would look in awe at the sheer stupidity of finding the perfect way to making near infinite work produce near zero production.

    Think for a moment how rapidly a great classical piano player (or any instrument with spatially arranged keys) moves across the keys, faster than conscious thought.  The player's cerebellum fine tuned by years of repeating the same sequences many thousands of times.   Now imagine what the load would be on the cerebellum if the piano was context sensitive single octave.

    How about Jazz piano player that is improvising?  How creative do you think he could be on a constantly shifting landscape?

    You are not pushing the physical limits, you are pushing the mental limits here. 

    As your thesis advisor, I would suggest finding another topic.


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    • From: Viken, Norway
    • Registered: 13-Dec-2006
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    16-Jan-2009 00:13:39#4 Re: How far can our minds go?

    It is a somewhat proven fact that I can type at around 240 WPM... as long as I don't have to think about what I'm typing. So I don't think my motor skills per se are very limiting to my typing speeds.

    On the other hand, your suggestion has already been done more or less. It's called stenography. The advantage to it is that you can write up to 350 WPM. The disadvantages are that it's a lot of work to learn and use, and people can't read it directly.

    So if people aren't willing to put in the small extra effort to learn Dvorak (or even Colemak!!!), they aren't going to learn anything as complex as what you're suggesting either. It is the mind that's limiting us. It has a lot on... itself, as it were.

    *** Learn Colemak in 2–5 steps with Tarmak! ***
    *** Check out my Big Bag of Keyboard Tricks for Win/Linux/TMK... ***

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    16-Jan-2009 08:30:36#5 Re: How far can our minds go?

    It's an interesting idea, but I think the mental burden of keeping track of 26 (or more) different layouts would be far too great.  It'd be like dealing with vi's modes, except an order of magnitude worse.  (And I say this as someone who likes vi.)

    It might be somewhat more workable if, instead of a different layout for every letter, you have the same basic layout all the time, but swap the top and home rows, or bottom and home rows, depending on the last key pressed.  I still think it'd be a disaster, but at least then mere mortals would actually be able to learn the thing.  :)

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    26-Apr-2009 23:18:09#6 Re: How far can our minds go?

    Just for the record, I took the idea. Look for "Context sensitive layout implementation for Linux" here on the forums, it's very hackish but hey it works. I think this context sensitive layout thing could be usable if you add the possibility to bind letter sequences to keys. (though it could be a killer for apps like vim)

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    04-May-2009 18:09:09#7 Re: How far can our minds go?

    My main slowness when typing is the lack of a 'backword' key.  I'm trying to work with the freedesktop.org guys to figure out how to lock the Ctrl modifier on the backspace key.
    After that it'll probably be my brain.

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