Debouncing defeats the Flash

    How many of us are not fans of Superheros and Supervillains in Marvel and DC comics? Well, I hope many of us are. Different Superheros and Supervillains have different superpowers. But we will be talking about only one superpower today: speed. Who does not know the Flash? He is one of the most important superheroes of DC comics. He is called a speedster, a superhero who operates at high speed. And he is not alone. There are many speedsters in different comic and movie plots like the Quicksilver who beat up the Hawkeye in 'Avengers: Age of Ultron', the woman supervillain Faora who wiped a cluster of the army and fought with the Superman in 'Man of Steel', the Quicksilver in X-Men series who was the son of the Magneto. Well don't think I am confused, the Quicksilver is a part of both X-Men and Avengers series, probably Marvel ran out of superhero names 😁. If you guys know any better reasons please comment your answers. There are many other speedster sidekicks and villains in these comics. In the Indian context, how could we forget Mr. Rajinikanth? He is well known for beating up villains in lightening speed.

    It is and has always been a topic of debate among fans who is the fastest of them all? Who can beat up whom? Well, today we won't dive into this debate. Rather I will introduce you to someone else who can potentially beat all these guys in one particular task. Really? Which task? Who is this new superhero? Well, to answer you, the task is Typing and that someone is not a superhero or even a person, it is more of a concept in Engineering. It's called 'De-bouncing'. Let's understand what this is.

    A single push of a key in the keyboard can result in dozens of spurious open/close transition. As a result, the computer may read false signals (key presses). For example, you press 'a' in the keyboard, and the screen reader actually reads 'aaaaaaa....', it won't be pleasant at all. That's where we apply the concept of de-bouncing to inhibit the emission of these faulty signals once the first one is emitted. The fastest typing speed recorded to date is 216wpm (words per minute)[1]. So if we consider an average of 5 letters per word it will result in 1080 letters per minute, about 55ms to type a letter for the fastest human typist. That's why we generally throttle the keypress signal emission to once in every 50 milliseconds. So about 1200 words per minute. Similar use cases can be thought for mouse clicks, search suggestions that appear as we type in the search bar, etc. This concept is heavily applied in electrical system design and many other fields of engineering.

    Now coming to our speedsters, you must have seen in some plots these guys complete their girlfriend's essay by typing everything for her in a second or browsing through the internet to get the battle plan ready in the blink of an eye. Show-offs. They can not type any faster than 1200 letters a minute in a keyboard not specifically designed for them. And in all these plots I have never seen keyboards and computers specifically designed for these guys.

References

1. https://www.ratatype.com/learn/average-typing-speed/