From: Eric Mahurin <eric.mahurin@...>
Date: 2007-05-06T10:59:27+09:00
Subject: Re: Unofficial Ruby Quiz -- Ranking Choices

On 5/3/07, Ken Bloom <kbloom@gmail.com> wrote:
> I have a list of some items, and I would like to manually rank which ones
> are most important to me. But it's not easy to rank them when I'm looking
> at them all at once, so I'd like to consider them in pairs and choose
> from each pair which one is most important to me. Then I'd like to use my
> answers to those questions to create a ranked list. Anyone think they can
> come up with a good program to quiz me about these items pairwise, and
> output a ranking?

The way I see it, ranking is nothing more than sorting and choosing
between pairs is just the comparison of the sort.  So, here is a
one-liner given the item list in a file and the questions on stdin:

ruby -e 'puts(ARGF.read.split.sort { |a,b| print "1: #{a}\n2: #{b}\n";
STDIN.gets.to_i*2-3}.inspect)' <item-file>

Eric