This is not precisely a Perl question, but I beg forgiveness and hope that I might find wisdom here regardless.

The problem is as follows:

Let's say we were dealing with a group of people in possession of two distinct and (for our purposes) unrelated attributes. Assuming we can consider them to be independent of one another, I'll offer height and weight as an example. I'll store these values in arrays @height and @weight, with the indices of the arrays corresponding to the individual people in the group. (So @height(0) and @weight(0) are the height and weight of the first person, and so on.) The mission: to select the two people with the greatest combined heights and weights. Given that height and weight are measured in different units, I want the solution to reflect the greatest heights and weights comparative to the rest of the group. (So person(1) with a height 20% above average and a weight 12% above average would be selected over person(2) with a height 28% above average and a weight only 2% above average.)

Also.. how could I go about scaling the solution if I wanted to select three, four, or more people from the group? What would happen if I added a third or fourth attribute to deal with?

Dealing with this efficiently has been a nightmare for me. If anyone has any references to solutions to this type of problem, I'd be greatly appreciative. Thanks in advance for the help.

-Terwin

In reply to Ranking people by weight and height by Anonymous Monk

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