Better, Simpler Programming Contest

[atul]

Originally posted by Saber Cherry:
You have 3 resource types (gold, resources, and holy, abbreviated gcost, rcost, and hcost), and some number (n) of units. We will assume all the units are of value corresponding to their cost.

The goal: Make a production queue that minimizes wasted resources!

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.

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.