Hi everybody, I am writing the registration and administration backend for a worldwide youth club organisation, which will expect about 12''000 visitors next year on their meeting. For the activities and accommodation, these visitors need to be divided into groups of 15-17 people according to certain criteria. I''m hoping there is a way for Ruby (maybe Rails) to automate this task. Here are the rules: - 15-17 people per group - all people in one group must be have the same "age range" (13-17, 28-25, 26-35, >35 years). This is easy, just divide them by age range and treat each age range seperately. - Siblings should not be seperated, and there should not be more than one family/sibling-pair in each group. This could be done by leaving out all users with a "sibling_id" entered, and filling them in later. - People who checked "Traveling together with ..." in the application form should not be seperated. (same as above) - There should be a mix of nationalities, but no language barriers in one group (ie. everybody must speak at least one common language). and so on (some other rules aren''t fixed yet). I''m actually thinking to write a script that randomly distributes the people into groups and then takes all "invalid" groups and re-distributes the people in there, until all groups are OK by the above rules. But I guess coding the validation process is just as hard as coming up with a procedure that does this distribution in an "orderly" fashion, and is extensible with additional rules where necessary. Any ideas would be great. I could perhaps code this in a dumb procedural fashion using lots of if, while, and for loops; but I kind of suspect that Ruby can do better than that. Jens --~--~---------~--~----~------------~-------~--~----~ You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "Ruby on Rails: Talk" group. To post to this group, send email to rubyonrails-talk-/JYPxA39Uh5TLH3MbocFFw@public.gmane.org To unsubscribe from this group, send email to rubyonrails-talk-unsubscribe-/JYPxA39Uh5TLH3MbocFFw@public.gmane.org For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/rubyonrails-talk?hl=en -~----------~----~----~----~------~----~------~--~---