daverave:

I had a bit of time on my lunch break, so I whipped a little something up. It's pretty close, but there are still a few tweaks I have in mind for it...

#!/usr/bin/perl
use strict;
use warnings;
my @universe = (1, 10);
my @ranges = ( [ 1, 3 ], [2, 7], [10, 2] );
       
# Normalize the lists
my @nrm_rng = map { ($$_[0] < $$_[1]) ? $_
                    : ( [ $$_[0]-$universe[1], $$_[1] ],
                        [ $$_[0], $$_[1] + $universe[1]-$universe[0] ]
+ ) 
                  } @ranges;
       
# Dump lists
printf("% 2u ",$_) for $universe[0] .. $universe[1];
print "\n";
print  "-- " for $universe[0] .. $universe[1];          
print "\n";
for my $R (@nrm_rng) {
    printf("%2s ", ($_>= $$R[0] and $_<=$$R[1]) ? "XX" : "")
        for $universe[0] .. $universe[1];
    print ": ($$R[0], $$R[1])\n";
}       

my $arMax;     
my @out;
my @working;   
for my $col ($universe[0] .. $universe[1]) {
        $arMax=undef;
        # Add and remove working lists based on column position
        push @working, grep { $col>=$$_[0] } @nrm_rng;
        @nrm_rng = grep { $col < $$_[0] } @nrm_rng;
        @working = grep { $col<=$$_[1] } @working;

        # Compute result for each list
        for (@working) {
                $$_[2] = 3+2*min(abs($col-$$_[0]),abs($col-$$_[1]));
                if (!defined($arMax)
                        or ($$arMax[2]<$$_[2])
                        or ($$arMax[2]==$$_[2] and $$arMax[1]<$$_[1]) 
+) {
                        $arMax=$_;
                }
        }
        $out[$col] = defined($arMax) ? sprintf("% 2u",$$arMax[2]) : ' 
+1';

#       print "$col ",
#           "wrk: ", join(", ", map { "(".join(",",@$_).")" } @$_, @wo
+rking), "\n";

        # Remove lists that will no longer give us values
        @working = grep { $_ eq $arMax or $$arMax[1] < $$_[1] } @worki
+ng;
}
print "FINAL: ", join(' ', @out), "\n";

sub min {
        my ($l, $r) = (@_);
        return ($l<$r) ? $l : $r;
}
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...roboticus

Update:I reformatted one of the lines of code to get rid of an ugly line break.

Update 2: Code edits: (1) Set ranges as per daverave's request, (2) added debug trace (commented out print), (3) bugfix ($arMax=undef at start of loop), (4) bugfix (list normalization). I didn't replace all the code, so I may have made an error, so let me know if you see something wrong. Currently, though, running it shows me:

roboticus@Work: /Work/Perl/PerlMonks
$ perl 868827_ranges_and_such.pl
 1  2  3  4  5  6  7  8  9 10 
-- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- 
XX XX XX                      : (1, 3)
   XX XX XX XX XX XX          : (2, 7)
XX XX                         : (0, 2)
                           XX : (10, 11)
 5  5  5  7  7  5  3  1  1  3 : FINAL
[download]