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April 2013 Archives

Item Grouper: Efficiently arrange things in groups

Posted at age 24.

My mom needed arrange for 18 new employees to meet each other via a series of group sessions of four groups meeting at a time. In order to make each session as long as possible, she needed an efficient set of combinations to have each person meet each other person in as few sessions as possible.

She ended up manually grouping all the employees and came up with a solution that required nine sessions, which is pretty good. But I wrote a program that solves her problem using only eight sessions. And it only takes a few seconds, versus the much longer amount of time to do it manually.

Screen Shot 2013-04-10 at 15.25.08.jpg

Item Grouper source code

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