From: "Jesús Gabriel y Galán" <jgabrielygalan@...>
Date: 2007-10-16T23:43:26+09:00
Subject: Re: Ruby for arranging fencing competitions

On 10/16/07, Milo Thurston <knirirr@gmail.com> wrote:
> Sport fencing competitions are organised in pools, where every fencer
> fences every other and the total score is totted up at the end. Sheets
> like this are used to keep track of which bouts have been played and
> what the score is:
> http://www.soton.ac.uk/~fencing/files/pool.pdf
> These sheets show an order of bouts for between 4-7 fencers, a typical
> number in a pool. An impending competition* got me wondering how one
> might use Ruby to generate those lists of bouts. A simple list of what
> bouts need to be fought is easy, and I wrote a simple script that
> produces an array of the following values for any number of contestants
> (in this case 4):
>
> 1 - 2
> 1 - 3
> 1 - 4
> 2 - 3
> 2 - 4
> 3 - 4
>
> The difficult bit is that fencers need to be given a rest between bouts
> if possible, so this order won't do. Simply randomising this array may
> still mean someone having to do more than one fight in a row. Not having
> a mathematical background I can't think of a suitable method to approach
> this, and if anyone could suggest some hints I'd be interested to know.
>
> * I can, of course, use the existing pool sheets for the competition;
> this is just for my amusement.

Food for RubyQuiz?

Jesus.