How would you go about tackling this problem?

Posted by incrediman on Stack Overflow See other posts from Stack Overflow or by incrediman
Published on 2010-04-08T03:27:06Z Indexed on 2010/04/08 3:33 UTC
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language-agnostic

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programming-contest

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I have a programming contest coming up in about half a week, and I've been prepping :)

I found a bunch of questions from this canadian competition, they're great practice:

http://cemc.math.uwaterloo.ca/contests/computing/2009/stage2/day1.pdf

I'm looking at problem B ("Dinner").

Any idea where to start? I can't really think of anything besides the naive approach (ie. trying all permutations) which would take too long to be a valid answer.

Btw, the language there says c++ and pascal I think, but i don't care what language you use - I mean really all I want is a brief description of how to tackle the problem. Like "use X technique treating each programmer as a Y" or something :)

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