Lasse Vågsæther Karlsen wrote: > Paul Rubin wrote: > >> Lasse Vågsæther Karlsen <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> writes: >> >>> I have a list of items and a "rule" for ordering them. <snip>
Ok, managed to implement the algorithm. Might not be the optimal solution (memory and speed-wise) but it worked and doesn't take too long to run either so I'm going to stick with it. I have a different question though, along the same lines, but one that doesn't need a solution, just want to know if something like it exists. A while back I had an application that had a lot of items that it needed to order. The problem, however, was that the rules was not defined at all. Instead it was opted for a visual solution where the user would be presented with images and had to rearrange them in the order that was necessary. The application was one I helped build for a friend which combined images from several cameras and allowed him to sort them according to the contents so that he could get a timeline formed. The date/time stamps on the cameras was not directly usable for various reasons so the visual ordering was what we ended up on. For instance, two of the cameras was not digital ones so they had no timestamp except for the one provided by the scanning software. In that application we talked about presenting the user with two and two images and he just had to click on the image that came first. The problem with this was to try to present the "right" images to the user so that he had to minimize the number of clicks. In other words, try to pick nodes in the graph and ask the user to provide the direction of the edge, and the "picking algorithm" would work in such a way that the number of edges would be minimized. Not sure if I'm explaining it correctly. The solution we ended up with was to present the user with all the images in one big timeline and just let him drag them around. This worked. What I was wondering about is if there is an algorithm that would do what I want? Ie. help me pick the nodes so as to minimize the number of edges. Obviously the answer to the first pair of nodes will influence which nodes will be subsequently picked, so each answer would stear the algorithm in a way, not just go into the final problem. If anyone got the name of such an algorithm or something I would like to look at it at least. Application is built and deployed so I'm not looking for a solution to implement. -- Lasse Vågsæther Karlsen http://usinglvkblog.blogspot.com/ mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] PGP KeyID: 0x2A42A1C2 -- http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-list
