Coding Challenge

[Brian Yennie]

Malte,

How about something like this:

1) Normalize all of your relations to "older than" (reverse of "younger than")

So if you started with:

Malte is older than Bjornke
Mark is older than Malte
Mark is younger than Fred
George is younger than Fred

You now have these ordered pairs:

Malte,Bjornke
Mark, Malte
Fred,Mark
Fred, George

Ignore "equals" relations for now.

2) Combine any places where a name occurs in both the 1st and last items, repeat as necessary:

=>
Malte,Bjornke
Fred, Mark, Malte
Fred, George

=>
Fred, Mark, Malte, Bjornke
Fred, George

4) For any "equals" relations, simply treat them as aliases in the final analysis. If a name doesn't appear in your list, try all of the aliases because the result will be the same.

5) To answer a question, use each resulting line as a test.

Examples: 
If Person A > Person B, then they will appear before them in at least 1 line
If Person A < Person B, then they will appear after them in at least 1 line
If Person A = Person B, then they must not appear on the same line

This probably isn't perfect, but maybe a good direction?


> Thanks for the head ups folks,
> 
> Björnke and Mark: I do not have the exact ages to sort by. All I do have is relations:
> 
> Malte is older than Björnke
> Mark is older than Malte
> 
> And now I need to compute if it is valid to say: 
> - Björnke is older than Mark  (obviously not)
> - Björnke is the same age as Mark (obviously not)
> - Björnke is younger than Mark. (That´s the one)
> 
> What comes easy to the human brain in fact appears to be a lot more difficult when having to be tackled computationaly.
> 
> Chris: Yes, I want such a list in the end. But in order to finally get this I will need to tell the machine which relations are legal first (the user tells which relations there are) and ideally filter out the data for relations that make no sense. Now I wish it was easy to tell the machine to just use logic and make sense itself :D This comparison has to be done for thousands of entities (children in this case). 
> 
> Cheers,
> 
> Malte