It also depends on the amount of kids, families and stays. If the numbers are low, by hand may be a lot easier and faster
Kind regards/met vriendelijke groet, Serge Fonville http://www.sergefonville.nl 2013/10/2 Tamara Temple <tamouse.li...@gmail.com> > > On Oct 1, 2013, at 1:51 PM, Floyd Resler <fres...@adex-intl.com> wrote: > > > Here's my task: A group of kids is going to be staying with different > host families throughout the next 8 months. The number of kids staying > with a host family can range from 2 to 10. When deciding which kids should > stay together at a host family, the idea is for the system to put together > kids who have stayed with each other the least on past weekends. So, if a > host family can keep 5 kids, then the group of 5 kids who have stayed > together the least will be chosen. > > > > I can't think of an easy, quick way to accomplish this. I've tried > various approaches that have resulted in a lot of coding and being very > slow. My idea was to give each group of kids a score and the lowest score > is the group that is selected. However, this approach wound of iterating > through several arrays several times which was really slow. Does anyone > have any ideas on this puzzle? > > > > Thanks! > > Floyd > > > > > > -- > > PHP General Mailing List (http://www.php.net/) > > To unsubscribe, visit: http://www.php.net/unsub.php > > > > While definitely a tempting coding exercise, I just want to say that if > this is urgent in any way, shuffling cards with the kids' names on them by > hand might just be faster and less frustrating :) > > OTOH, if this is something you're going to have to figure out week after > week, then a software solution might be handy. > > This is also not an *easy* problem to solve; there isn't a simple approach > to optimizing this sort of thing because you're building a net between all > the various kids based on past stays, in addition to the constraints of > host family capacity. Thus your previous code attempts might in fact be > the end result. > > Obviously, structuring the data is the key here. > > I'm thinking of 3 primary models: Kids, Hosts, and Stays. > > Kids and Hosts seem pretty obvious. Stays is the interesing model, and > needs to have joining tables with Kids and Hosts. > > A Stay will have one Host, and have many Kids and a date. > > The algorithm then needs to make the graph where it can pull out the > number of times any particular kid has stayed with another, looking > something like this: > > Amy: > Ben: 10 > Jill: 3 > Carlos: 7 > Chen: 2 > Ben: > Amy: 10 > Jill: 5 > Carlos: 8 > Chen: 3 > Jill: > … and so on > > Then you be able to pull through that graph and find the smallest number > of stays for each kid. > > Not simple, but I hope this helps. > > > > -- > PHP General Mailing List (http://www.php.net/) > To unsubscribe, visit: http://www.php.net/unsub.php > >
