From: John Small Date: 2008-10-22T00:28:37+09:00 Subject: packing algorithm in Ruby I have a simple problem in Rails, I need to pack lists of things onto the screen most efficiently. But it's not really a Rails problem it's a simple packing algorithm. Well not really that simple since the general packing algo is NP-complete, but in this case it's cut down to a very simple case. So I'm wondering how to do it in Ruby. In a declarative language like Prolog it's quite simple, but Ruby is mostly procedural so it's a bit fiddly. With all the irrelevant stuff taken out it boils down to this. I have an array of numbers e,g. ar = [26,10,15,18,12] I want to pack those numbers into neat little arrays like this end_result = [[26],[10,15],[17,12]]. So that all the little sub-arrays are roughly the same length. in this case 26,25,29. The reason for I need this is that they're lists which I want to put in three cols on the screen. But I want a fairly general algorithm to do it. Now ruby has some pretty cool stuff for dealing with arrays. Is there a simple cool Ruby way to do this or do I have to use some clunky brute force tactic? Thanks in advance John Small -- Posted via http://www.ruby-forum.com/.