Typewriter
This repository contains a Java program that uses CPLEX to optimize the layout of a one-dimensional typewriter keyboard. See the blog post "Optimizing 19th Century Typewriters" for details of the problem.
The program requires two external libraries:
- CPLEX (tested with version 12.8); and
- Apache Commons CLI 1.4 (for processing command line options).
The Apache library is open-source.
For a list of options, run the program with either -h or --help in the command line.
The program requires a data file containing the number
n
of symbols to be placed on the keyboard (for example, 26 for the lower case English alphabet) and a square matrix of dimension n \times n
whose i,j
entry contains the frequency with which symbol j
immediately follows symbol i
. The file cro26_data.txt is a sample data file, based on the content of the blog post by Nathan Brixius cited above, using data he generously provided.