I have checked the Dominus book. The partitioning problem shown is solved recursively, but it's slightly different to this problem in that (with this problem) you only know the quality of the fit once the overall selection (for a bucket) is made. Often there is some blend of allocations which fit really well, but it's easy to miss those if you get too clever with the algorithm.

As for the measurement of fitness - I'm having trouble deciding, but I think the sum of the errors is reasonable. Certainly not the max error because that will most often occur for allocations which are very small (1,2 or 3).

With monks help, I think I'm starting to get a better handle on this problem - I have an idea for a new approach based on a combination of a heuristic and brute-force.

I work in an organisation which is (supposedly) stuffed full of smart people, but when I get stuck I always come to the monks first :)

In reply to Re^2: Average Price Algorithm by camelcom
in thread Average Price Algorithm by camelcom

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