<html><div style='background-color:'><P>Hi Guys,</P> <P>Im a fourth year computer science in Ireland and Im doing my final year project on Haskell programming. What Im doing is writing a program in Haskell for the maths department for my college. What it involves is this: There is a class of 50 students and there are about 25 staff members. Now some staff members take on three students, two students or even just one student depending on the staff member for supervising students. The students rank the projects the staff members have on offer in order of preference from 1 to 4 (see Haskell code in mail attachment). The program finds the best assignment of projects for students based on their ranking. The program works fine and that but my problem is that it takes way too much time to execute the program. When I reduced class number to 10 students and only included 10 staff for allocation projects it took thirty seconds to execute. That was fine. But when I increased class number to 20 students it took 10 minutes to execute. I tried it once for a class of 50 students and I wouldnt let it finish since it was taking far too long. Im just wondering is there any way that the program can be improved so that execution of program can be faster. Even if there were software available that makes Haskell programs runs faster that would be a great help. I have a presentation in this, which I have only ten minutes to show the department what Im talking about, and I want to include a demonstration of the program in it. Can you please help me with this since I tried a number of things with this and it never once seemed to improve performance. </P>
One thing you might consider is whether or not it needs to run that fast - what happens if a student runs out of project choices? Do they need to pick new choices? We have a similar system here at York, and it ends up taking several days to run because students have to modify their choices to allow it to work. I've snipped your code and ignored it, because I'm guessing that your uni's rules on collusion are as strict as they are here, and they wouldn't be too chuffed if I were to give you a hand with it. Hope this helps Bob