In case anyone is interested in entering:
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Date: Sat, 17 Nov 2001 10:14:41 -0500
To: CHALLENGE-A [EMAIL PROTECTED]
From: Bob Boonstra [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Subject: December 2001 Programmer's Challenge Problem Statement
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Enclosed is the Programmer's Challenge for December 2001.
Mail solutions to:
mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED]
Due Date: 11:59PM, ET, 1 December 2001
Test code is not needed for this Challenge, as you will provide a complete
application. Test data will be available shortly.
Note that we are allowing solutions built using alternative development environments
(e.g., REALbasic, MetaCard, Revolution).
-- Bob
PARENT-TEACHER CONFERENCES
If you have children in school, you are familiar with parent-teacher conferences.
Little Johnny isn't doing so well in French, or Algebra, or perhaps Advanced Calculus
if your school has a gifted and talented program. Or Sally is doing very well in
Subatomic Physics, and you'd like to hear her teachers tell you so.
I was reminded recently of a Challenge suggested by Ernst Munter to write code that
would help schools schedule these conferences. Your Challenge this month is to arrange
a set of parent-teacher conferences that maximize the parents' satisfaction and
minimize the amount of time wasted by both parents and teachers in between conferences.
You will be given three data sets to work with for each test case. The first, in a
file childrenNN.txt (where NN is a number from 01 to the number of test cases), will
have one line for each child in the school, containing the child's name followed by
the names of one or two parents. No child will appear on more than one line, and there
will be no duplicate names of children. A sample would be the following:
Johnny Smith, Donald Smith, Marilyn Waters-Smith
Sally Jones,Samantha Jones
The second data set, in a file named teachersNN.txt, maps children to their teachers.
Each line contains the name of a child, followed by the name of one of his/her
teachers, followed by a number from 0 to 9 indicating the strength of the parents'
desire to talk with that teacher. A value of 0 indicates no conference is desired, up
to a value of 9 indicating the strongest desire for a conference. Example lines from
this file might be:
Johnny Smith, Richard Darwin, 3
Johnny Smith, Rene Descartes, 9
Johnny Smith, Edgar Allen Poe, 0
Sally Jones, Rene Descartes, 5
Sally Jones, Albert Einstein, 9
The final data set, in a file named schedulesNN.txt, identifies which parents are
available at which times. The first line in this file contains the number N of
conference periods available for scheduling. All teachers can be available for any or
all of the periods from 1..N. Subsequent lines contain the names of parents, along
with the first and the last conference period for which they will be available.
Parents will be available for any period between their first and last available
periods, inclusive. Each parent whose name appears in the children.txt file will
appear on one line in the schedules.txt file. Example lines from this file might be:
9
Donald Smith, 1,9
Samantha Jones, 4,9
Marilyn Waters-Smith,4,6
Finally, the number of test cases is provided in a file input.txt, with a single line
containing the number of test cases:
15
Your code needs to produce output that provides the matching of parents to teachers.
The output (conferencesNN.txt) should contain one line for each conference, with the
name of the teacher first, the name of the parent second, and the conference period
third. No parent or teacher can be in more than one conference during a given period.
Both parents of a given child can participate in a conference with a teacher if they
are both available during that period (two lines would be output in such a case). One
line in such a file might be:
Richard Darwin,Marilyn Waters-Smith,5
Finally, your solution needs to produce a log file (log.txt) that contains, for each
test case, the execution time in milliseconds that your solution required to process
the test case.
Once again, the objective is to maximize parents' satisfaction with the conference
schedule, and to minimize wasted time. The Challenge will be scored based on the
number of penalty points accumulated by each entry. If a desired conference is not
accommodated, you will accumulate 1-9 penalty points, depending on the strength of the
parents' desire for that conference as expressed in teachers.txt. If a parent has a
gap in the conference schedule, where a conference is scheduled during periods N and
N+2, but not in N+1, you will accumulate one penalty point for each unscheduled period
in the gap. Similar penalty points will accumulate for gaps in the conference schedule
for teachers. Finally, the penalty will be increased by 10%
