[Saber Cherry]

Originally posted by atul:
This assumes all the different kinds of resources have same value when wasted, and no bonus/penalty is put due different troop composition, just by wasted resources? Sorry, too much school work regarding problems like this, it just bugs to see all the variables having same weight of '1'. That is, if I understood the above correctly.

Sorry, I was not very clear...

me:
The program will be graded according to how many resources are used (% of total for each type) and how fast it runs.

I meant to say that the ideal would be to minimize the wasted percentage of each resource. So if you had holy=4 and gold=100, wasting 1 point of holy would be a 25% waste, and wasting one gold would only be a 1% waste. It would be possible to specify a problem in which the three resources had arbitrary values... but in the interest of keeping things simple, it seems that giving each resource a value of (100/total) would be OK. What do you think? Would you prefer arbitrary values?

Haven't followed much these programming contest threads, what are the limits as to programming? Has to be stand-alone application? Specific language? For you know, I think M$ Excel has built-in function to do specifically this kind of optimization (I know, wouldn't apply such to the contest).

Not sure, I have feeling there was some systematic and elegant way of doing this with matrix operations or such of some sort. Should look some old school hand-outs to see for sure.

There is no easy way to solve this problem quickly. The limits are this:

1) You can use any language, but you must provide the source code for your solution, without any precompiled black boxes. Thus, a prebuilt Excel function would not work.
2) Scripting Languages and spreadsheets are fine if you put in the algorithms yourself.
3) Library functions are fine for simple things like sorting, storing data, hashing, reading files, comparing strings, and such. All code for solving the actual problem should be your own: in other words, don't cheat by finding some linear-combination optimizer. This is pretty subjective; it's a contest for fun, not for any cash prize=)

[ March 02, 2004, 20:43: Message edited by: Saber Cherry ]