Re: [libreoffice-users] challenge...

At 16:37 22/08/2016 +0200, Wiebe van der Worp wrote:
> There is a group of ~100 people (n). In 5 time slots they visit 5 
> rooms in groups of ~20 people (n/5). The composition of the groups 
> should be as different as possible for each time slot. One person 
> may not visit a room more than once.

I'm guessing your "about" 20 is because of the "about 100"; do you 
actually need all groups to be exactly n/5? I also get the general 
idea of "as different as possible", of course - but I think you'd 
need to define this more precisely if you need to balance this 
requirement against other constraints.

> Suppose Column A contains id's, say 1..100. Col. B contains first 
> time slot room numbers: =INT(RAND()*5+1).

That will put everyone into a group, but by no means produce equal 
n/5-sized groups.

> C, D and E contain room numbers for time slot 2, 3 and 4. F contains 
> time slot 5, for row 1: =15-SUM(B1:E1). Does anyone have a 
> suggestion for C1, D1 and E1?

I think this is deceptive: the last grouping is easy only if you have 
already come up with a reliable algorithm for the intervening columns!

What you need here is a shuffling process. You can see it as 
shuffling your hundred people and then dividing them into five 
groups, but that makes ensuring that each person visits all five 
rooms problematic. And I'm guessing that this is your principal 
criterion. Better, then, to see the problem as shuffling the rooms 
that each person is to visit.

Here's an idea:

o In G1, enter =RAND() and fill this across and down to populate 
G1:K100 with random numbers. (You can hide this range or put it away 
on another sheet if you prefer.)

o In B1, enter =RANK(G1;$G1:$K1) and fill this across and down to fill B1:F100.

This will ensure that each person visits each room exactly once, but 
the groups sizes will vary from exactly n/5. You could use COUNTIF() 
to list the sizes of the twenty-five groups and determine the range 
of sizes using MIN() and MAX(). Then you could use Recalculate Hard 
(Ctrl+Shift+F9) repeatedly to regenerate the random numbers until you 
were happy with the group sizes.

This problem may be of the sort that would be much easier to solve 
through programming that via a spreadsheet.

I trust this helps.

Brian Barker


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