I miss math
How long would it take to decide?5 days now since I've been back in bangalore n Im in the process of catchin up with my pals. Just as I was mulling over how euphoric a get-together with old friends would be, M told me her experience arranging a get-together the last time she was here:She planned one but later realized that there were some of our friends who were caught up in ego clashes n break-ups n God-knows-what-all with each other. This meant A wouldn't attend the get-together when B was around, B wasn't fine when A and C were around and so on."Whew!" she sighed, "It was hell getting them all to meet at once. So I had to ditch the idea". She moved on to fill me in on other stuff, while I, who happened to be in a geeky mood then, was stuck right there, mulling over how her problem could've been solved. A few scratches here n there on whatever's left of my grey cells did manage to chalk out what I thought was a very straight-forward solution: (1)Make all possible pairs of 2 from the initial list of people you intend to invite.See whether every such pair matches any pair on the "enemy pairs" list.If it does, eliminate one of them and so on. I wasn't convinced of this brute-force method being the best one though.
A lil more thinking yielded this one (2)Make a list of all people and call this the initial list.In front of every person's name, write a number indicating the number of enemies he/she has and list all the enemies that he/she has.Now blindly include all people bearing the number 0 in your invitees list.Next look at people bearing the number 1.Suppose A bears the number 1 and B is listed as his enemy.Compare the numbers associated with A and B.Choose the lower-numbered one of these two into your invitee list and chuck his enemy into the excluded list. Next move on to persons bearing the number 2,3,4 and so on.
I guess this was somewhat better but I wasn't quite convinced it was perfectly alright.A little bit of googling yielded this. Shux! it hadn't quite occured to me that what I was trying to solve mentally for Ms.M, was in reality a fairly complex problem. Damn!I wanna go back to school.I miss math. Who knows? Black holes must've resulted from God dividing the universe by zero!
Quote for the day: A mathematician is a device for turning coffee into theorems.
~Paul Erdos
A lil more thinking yielded this one (2)Make a list of all people and call this the initial list.In front of every person's name, write a number indicating the number of enemies he/she has and list all the enemies that he/she has.Now blindly include all people bearing the number 0 in your invitees list.Next look at people bearing the number 1.Suppose A bears the number 1 and B is listed as his enemy.Compare the numbers associated with A and B.Choose the lower-numbered one of these two into your invitee list and chuck his enemy into the excluded list. Next move on to persons bearing the number 2,3,4 and so on.
I guess this was somewhat better but I wasn't quite convinced it was perfectly alright.A little bit of googling yielded this. Shux! it hadn't quite occured to me that what I was trying to solve mentally for Ms.M, was in reality a fairly complex problem. Damn!I wanna go back to school.I miss math. Who knows? Black holes must've resulted from God dividing the universe by zero!
Quote for the day: A mathematician is a device for turning coffee into theorems.
~Paul Erdos
posted by chutki @ 2:01 AM
3 comments
3 Comments:
Well, if math would solve all da problems in the world, maybe i cud never afford a math teacher. The nostalgia of meeting friends isn't always the same. After all, the only universal constant is change. Maybe the A's, the B's and the M's weren't really a part of this constant and those who are aren't dat constant after all. The constants are always changing, but the change is not always that constant. Since we cannot estimate the constant of change in the constant called change, why not change the constant itself and make a change to our own nostalgia???
You're here!! And no contact ;(
meeting everybody in group makes sense when everybody else want to do the same!!!!
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