From Julian Moore
If it takes Hans-Peter Salzmann three hours “on a good day” to compose a message of 400 characters by selecting letters using successive binary division of the alphabet, there is obviously room for improvement, even without implanting electrodes (22 February, p 36).
Niels Birbaumer’s work in this area is obviously of tremendous value, and the question is how to build upon it. Would it not be more efficient to use a trinary division method (as has been proven to be the most efficient system for successive division of choices), and to bolster that with the dictionary-based text prediction of mobile phones, which allows one key to stand for any of the three letters it carries?
This would seem to be a relatively simple change to make to the software, and might allow Salzmann and others to write significantly faster.
London, UK
