Andrei Alexandrescu wrote: > generally what one wants is a selection of "best of breed" stocks > that are among the top ones in a variety of categories. (Relative > importance could be assigned to each category.)
This is quite different and easier than the problem initially stated, because ranks must not be computed. 1) Compute the individual importance `ii' of each element `e' 2) Use the linear median algorithm to find the element `ek' whose individual importance `ii' is close to rank `k' of all elements `e', where `k' is the number of elements `e' acceptable as "best of the breed" 3) return all elements `e' whith `e.ii >= ek.ii'. This can be done by a sweep over the array. -manfred
