<rex.dwyer <at> syngenta.com> writes: > James, > It seems the 2*mean(x) term is irrelevant if you are seeking to > minimize sd. Then you want to sort the distances from smallest to > largest. Then it seems clear that your five values will be adjacent in > the list, since if you have a set of five adjacent values, exchanging > any of them for one further away in the list will increase the sd. The > only problem I see with this is that you can't use a number more than > once. In any case, you need to compute the best five pairs beginning > at position i in the sorted list, for 1<=i<=choose(n,2), then take the > max over all i. > There no R in my answer such as you'd notice, but I hope it helps just > the same. > Rex
You probably mean something like the following: x <- rnorm(10) y <- outer(x, x, "+") - (2 * mean(x)) o <- order(x) sd(c(y[o[1],o[10]], y[o[2],o[9]], y[o[3],o[8]], y[o[4],o[7]], y[o[5],o[6]])) This seems reasonable, though you would have to supply a more stringent argument. I did two tests and it works alright. --Hans Werner ______________________________________________ R-help@r-project.org mailing list https://stat.ethz.ch/mailman/listinfo/r-help PLEASE do read the posting guide http://www.R-project.org/posting-guide.html and provide commented, minimal, self-contained, reproducible code.