Beefy Boxes and Bandwidth Generously Provided by pair Networks
laziness, impatience, and hubris
 
PerlMonks  

comment on

( [id://3333]=superdoc: print w/replies, xml ) Need Help??

Keep in mind that this is a weighted distribution: three categories with weight 10 are worth one category with weight 30 (so if N=2, you'd want 3/1 rather than 2/2).

This looks to me like a constrained (order must not change) variant on the bin packing problem. Bin packing is NP-complete in the general case (IIRC), but the order constraint makes this quite tractable (see merlyn's typesetting comment). This problem has a rather good (n lg n or n^2) solution via dynamic programming: the typesetting problem was on one of my assignments in an advanced algorithms class. (Hey, did Ovid just post a homework problem? ;-b) I'll dig through my old notes when I get home from work and see if I can find it. In the mean time, you (Ovid) might look at Text::Format for ideas.

Update: D'oh! Another constraint on the text formatting problem that isn't present here is a maximum on line length (bin size), which makes it hard to reject a bogus solution (too much in one bin) quickly. On the other hand, this solution is constrained by number of bins, which the text formatting solution isn't. Hmm.... (Great problem, Ovid!)

--
The hell with paco, vote for Erudil!
:wq


In reply to Re(2): Puzzle: need a more general algorithm by FoxtrotUniform
in thread Puzzle: need a more general algorithm by Ovid

Title:
Use:  <p> text here (a paragraph) </p>
and:  <code> code here </code>
to format your post; it's "PerlMonks-approved HTML":



  • Are you posting in the right place? Check out Where do I post X? to know for sure.
  • Posts may use any of the Perl Monks Approved HTML tags. Currently these include the following:
    <code> <a> <b> <big> <blockquote> <br /> <dd> <dl> <dt> <em> <font> <h1> <h2> <h3> <h4> <h5> <h6> <hr /> <i> <li> <nbsp> <ol> <p> <small> <strike> <strong> <sub> <sup> <table> <td> <th> <tr> <tt> <u> <ul>
  • Snippets of code should be wrapped in <code> tags not <pre> tags. In fact, <pre> tags should generally be avoided. If they must be used, extreme care should be taken to ensure that their contents do not have long lines (<70 chars), in order to prevent horizontal scrolling (and possible janitor intervention).
  • Want more info? How to link or How to display code and escape characters are good places to start.
Log In?
Username:
Password:

What's my password?
Create A New User
Domain Nodelet?
Chatterbox?
and the web crawler heard nothing...

How do I use this?Last hourOther CB clients
Other Users?
Others drinking their drinks and smoking their pipes about the Monastery: (4)
As of 2024-03-19 05:26 GMT
Sections?
Information?
Find Nodes?
Leftovers?
    Voting Booth?

    No recent polls found