Improving the Evolutionary Computation for General Keyboard Arrangement Problem

Thai traditional computer keyboard layouts are derived from the Thai typewriter keyboard's layout, which supports typing with ten fingers. Hence, this layout is not optimized for typing on touch screen device with one finger. This article presents a new method in arrangement the position of Thai characters on the virtual keyboard to support typing by a single finger. The process of the new method consist of analysing Thai Language to create difference digraph table from Benchmark for Enhancing the Standard of Thai language processing corpus (BEST corpus), designed keyboard layout using evolutionary computation technique and estimated time speed of typing by model human hand movement with Fitts' Law. The experiment shows that new keyboard designed by the proposed method has achieved a typing speed faster than the Thai traditional keyboard layout.