Hi kennethk. First of all, sorry for not stating my intention concisely. I thought I had, but on re-reading I realise it's not clear.
However, as you correctly inferred, I'd like to (approximately) evenly distribute the data across a fixed number of drives (4, in this case). It looks like your first chunk of code does this, and produces far better results than my first attempt at placing the largest items first.

Embarrassingly, I've just looked at my code (which I didn't post) and realised that I in fact sorted in the wrong order, and it placed the smallest item first. The second lesson I should learn is that I should at least include the code that was faulty, as someone would've spotted it instantly. In any case I think I prefer your code slightly to my (now working) code, so I'll use that.

Thanks everyone (and sorry), as always some interesting responses, although I'm so far behind on the CS terms!


davis


In reply to Re^2: Computer science Problem - single dimension bin packing by davis
in thread Computer science Problem - single dimension bin packing by davis

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