By creating an account and participating you are, by definition, a monk, but that probably isn't what you mean. Even to become a "real monk", the only criterion is a passion for learning. Everything else, references, subroutines, and so on, will come with study and practice. Your advisor seems to be making sure you get plenty of the later. There is a rich supply of material here on this site that will help you get more comfortable with these things: both answers and questions by others tripped up by the same things tripping you up. Be sure to use Super Search to explore further.

As for clustering algorithms, a google search would be in order, but that will only give the algorithms, not how to implement them in Perl. You will need to get comfortable with subroutines, references and data structures to finish this particular project. The algorithms you need will be very hard to implement without them - see perldata, perldsc, perlreftut, and perlsub for starters. I'm sure others will have even better suggestions. It may seem like a lot of work to climb over that learning hump in a week, but I doubt your advisor would have made you take this course if he didn't believe in you. You can do it.

A while back (many months ago) someone posted a question on clustering algorithms in a networking context. The goal was to find the optimal subdivision of N machines into 2 clusters. A number of people posted coded solutions. Although it is a slightly different problem, you may want to look at that thread for a discussion of efficiency issues related to symmetrical matrices and examples of how to translate various clustering algorithms to code. See "Divide" challenge

You may also want to check out the following CPAN modules

• PerlMonks: module for cluster analysis
• CPAN: Algorithm::Cluster
• CPAN: PDL::Stats::Kmeans

Best, beth