On Oct 22, 2007, at 4:09 , manu wrote:
However looking at the number of permutations (26! = 403291461126605635584000000), quickly dampened my enthusiasm...
There must be some algorithm (dynamic programming ?), that cuts down the number of calculations involved in order to find the right combination. But I cannot identify the proper algorithm to use...
Being that I'm lousy at algorithms, I'm sure someone else will come up with something far better... but it occurs to me that you have enough information to reorder the search space such that you're more likely to find a combination which beats most of the search space early in an exhaustive search. For example, combinations of even- length names and even-numbered programmers take a time hit of 2 hours right off the bat due to the common prime factor 2, so you can probably defer those until you've exhausted other possibilities; even more so for names with many vowels. And if you find a combination whose time is less than some combination of delays, you can immediately drop any possibility which incurs those delays. -- brandon s. allbery [solaris,freebsd,perl,pugs,haskell] allbery@kf8nh.com system administrator [openafs,heimdal,too many hats] allbery@ece.cmu.edu electrical and computer engineering, carnegie mellon university KF8NH