Hi All, I have an application which has a two dimensional array of 24 rows each containing 20 floating point values. I need to analyse every single combination of every single set of 24 values. Essentially I only need to obtain the top 5 values for each permutation, many of which are going to be the same of course.
Idea A) I had originally thought of a looping mechanism to get a set of 24 values, sort them, grab the top 5 and so on. However, there are 20 ^ 24 combinations, and I suspect this will be incredibly time consuming. Idea B) Then I thought about just comparing within the loops, and only grabbing the top 5 values - but again I'm doing billions of comparisons and so perhaps this is just as bad. Idea C) I then thought that perhaps I could start off with a subset of the permutations, and try to determine whether the other values outside the permutations would affect the order, and analyse that way... I'm not even sure I have this idea straight in my head yet nor whether it would a) work, or b) be any faster than the two ideas above. I don't need any more than 3 decimal place accuracy, so I could convert these values to integers, if that makes any difference. Does anyone have any suggestions for me? Cheers, Chris. _______________________________________________ Delphi mailing list -> [email protected] http://www.elists.org/mailman/listinfo/delphi
