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)

(In reply to re: I have an algorithm which works, but... by ThoughtProvoker)

ThoughtProvoker wrote:  "My only addition is that basically, the program would "branch" the search tree every time there is more than one view to choose, and then recurse the tree every time it found a dead end.  This may be exactly what you meant to say."

Yup, that's basically how it would be handled by a program.  I worked out the algorithm doing it manually on paper, but there's a whole lot of steps you have to go through.  It should be fairly straight forward doing it on a computer, provided you have a simple way of building and traversing an N-tree.

Posted by Erik O. on 2004-06-23 16:57:59