From: Todd Benson <caduceass@...>
Date: 2007-06-24T03:33:00+09:00
Subject: Land use

Okay, I was going to make the subject "Trepidus use of Ruby, again"
just to make a bunch of people mad (and also catch their attention).
I think there is a really cool Ruby quiz in here that I just don't
know how to word.

I read Joop's land-use paper (he's not the author) and realized, what
an excellent quiz!

In a nutshell:

I have land divided up in a grid.  Why I use a grid instead of
something else is not important right now.  That grid has a certain
size to start with (for extra credit you can change the size and shape
of it).  Each section has characteristics.  Characteristics have
intrinsic value for the use of that section.  A land-use of a section
affects the feasibility of the land use of another land section
depending on how far away it is (their "relation" to each other).
Information you are given is this: what characteristics each section
of land has, that each section can have only one land use, and also
what each "weight" does every characteristic have for a particular
land use..  The question you are supposed to answer is "what's the
best way to section the land?"  In other words, this is an efficiency
question.  Don't worry about _why_ one thing has more weight than the
other.

Outside of the quiz:

The guys that wrote the paper got around the ambiguity here by
limiting their result set.  There's more than one answer.  So they
said: should it be that "facilities" are central or dispersed?  That
extra piece of information makes it more interesting becase
"facilities" have area-influence and houses only do as a group.  You
can take this as deep as you want.

Todd