Malte, How about something like this:
1) Normalize all of your relations to "older than" (reverse of "younger than") So if you started with: Malte is older than Bjornke Mark is older than Malte Mark is younger than Fred George is younger than Fred You now have these ordered pairs: Malte,Bjornke Mark, Malte Fred,Mark Fred, George Ignore "equals" relations for now. 2) Combine any places where a name occurs in both the 1st and last items, repeat as necessary: => Malte,Bjornke Fred, Mark, Malte Fred, George => Fred, Mark, Malte, Bjornke Fred, George 4) For any "equals" relations, simply treat them as aliases in the final analysis. If a name doesn't appear in your list, try all of the aliases because the result will be the same. 5) To answer a question, use each resulting line as a test. Examples: If Person A > Person B, then they will appear before them in at least 1 line If Person A < Person B, then they will appear after them in at least 1 line If Person A = Person B, then they must not appear on the same line This probably isn't perfect, but maybe a good direction? > Thanks for the head ups folks, > > Björnke and Mark: I do not have the exact ages to sort by. All I do have is > relations: > > Malte is older than Björnke > Mark is older than Malte > > And now I need to compute if it is valid to say: > - Björnke is older than Mark (obviously not) > - Björnke is the same age as Mark (obviously not) > - Björnke is younger than Mark. (That´s the one) > > What comes easy to the human brain in fact appears to be a lot more difficult > when having to be tackled computationaly. > > Chris: Yes, I want such a list in the end. But in order to finally get this I > will need to tell the machine which relations are legal first (the user tells > which relations there are) and ideally filter out the data for relations that > make no sense. Now I wish it was easy to tell the machine to just use logic > and make sense itself :D This comparison has to be done for thousands of > entities (children in this case). > > Cheers, > > Malte _______________________________________________ use-livecode mailing list use-livecode@lists.runrev.com Please visit this url to subscribe, unsubscribe and manage your subscription preferences: http://lists.runrev.com/mailman/listinfo/use-livecode
