Re: [Haskell-cafe] Re: combinatorial search with running bound

Hi Chung-chieh, When you ask for a pair of boxes, "How closely can they be brought together without intersection?" that provides a lower bound on the question "How closely can the groups be brought together?" (I.e. for that pair of boxes, bring them any closer and they intersect, so it is a lower bound.) The maximum of all these lower bounds in the minimum needed separation. -Mike Chung-chieh Shan wrote:

Michael Mossey wrote in article <3942.75.50.175.130.1253997756.squirrel@mail.alumni.caltech.edu> in gmane.comp.lang.haskell.cafe:

...

The problem is to determine how closely the groups can be brought together without any boxes intersection.

The basic algorithm is to consider each pair of boxes and ask if they have any "vertical overlap"---if so, figure out how closely they can be brought together without intersecting, otherwise ignore them. Then take the maximum of those numbers.

Wouldn't you mean minimum instead of maximum then?

I suspect that your code would be clearer without using a state monad.