Many members of the club disliked the lack of variety and togetherness at the club. Although the club still had 12 members, some members were threatening to quit because each schedule was so short and there were so few people around each table.

To satisfy their request, the club decided to seat themselves around a big table and create a longer schedule. The twelve members of the club seated themselves in a schedule such that during each block of 55 days, no person was between the same pair of people. How was the schedule constructed?

(Based on The Round Table)

...I actually wrote a nifty little Visual Basic program which does just fine finding the first 37 days in about 5 minutes...Then it goes into the freezer. One of the pitfalls in a program like that, is that it might be in a cul-de-sac: it might be in a sequence of days such that it cannot proceed further. So if my program detects such a situation, it reshuffles the deck and starts over. I am so convinced that my program would eventually find a solution if it were running on a decent computer, because it does so well on my dinky desktop, that I called one of the local colleges in my area. They told me to download my source code to a CD and bring it in to their open computer lab tomorrow, and I can run it for free on their system. It isn't a supercomputer, but it's a lot more powerful than my desktop. (I'll know from the frequency of my program's console displays whether it's running any faster.) So tomorrow at 7:00 a.m. I just might be on my way to solving this riddle.

:-)

 

 

 

 

 

 

Edited on March 31, 2004, 6:40 pm

Posted by Penny on 2004-03-31 13:57:06