From: Adam Akhtar Date: 2008-08-23T13:51:46+09:00 Subject: Interesting challenge - can it be done? Hi im learning ruby and making a few scripts here and there. As part of an ongoing script regarding ebay i came up with a challenge though i dont know if its possible. Given say 200 items from ebay from the same category e.g. cameras I would like put them in groups based on similiarity. E.g. find all listings that are for canon ixy 500 and put them in one group Also id like it to understand the difference between "canon ixy 500" and say 7 listings for "canon ixy 500 camera case" Another problem are the unrelated words in a listings title that the script would have to ingnore e.g. "Bargain", "RARE", "Very RARE", "Did I say it was RARE" etc Of course I dont expect it could ever be perfect but if it could be 60% accurate i would be happy! Elegance is not a priority here so if there is a "hack" which achieves similiar results to say some crazy A.I. routine which takes a year to write then thats great. What ever gets the job done! One hack i came up with was to look for model numbers using regexps. It works really well, but only if there is a model number. I suppose i could first group lisitngs with model numbers and then come up with some routine for the remainder. So for items without model numbers what can i do? Also if it takes 2 hours for the script to do the job then fine. At most 1000 listings will be used. Speed isnt an issue. What type of problem is this? is it a.i.??? Whre should i start researching (I checked wiki but there wasnt enough written for me to know which path to take). any help\pointers greatly appreciated. -- Posted via http://www.ruby-forum.com/.