Again, a fascinating thread. And amazingly I actually studied this kind of problem in university 20 years ago (shudder) under a brilliant professor called Ed Jernigan (University of Waterloo, faculty of Engineering, department of Systems Design).

So for scholarly research I can suggest Google.

Abigail-II's point is quite valid -- there need to be constraints on the solution otherwise optimization cannot be done. You need to do something like

--t. alex

"Mud, mud, glorious mud. Nothing quite like it for cooling the blood!"
--Michael Flanders and Donald Swann

In reply to Re: Sorting by geographical proximity / clumping groups of items based on X and Y by talexb
in thread Sorting by geographical proximity / clumping groups of items based on X and Y by vroom

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