Well, you could set up a genetic algorithm to try and guess based on proximity. So you'd need an easy function to get all movie theatres within 5 (or X) miles of a store. You'd also need video rental reports to train the algorithm on - that way you can practice until its perfect with the history, then set it to work on the future...
That said, GA are hard and I haven't done any in awhile :) But perl is definitely a good language for it, and you can find tons of GA-in-perl tutorials out there... Ciao, Kevin Watt Community Manager, Allpoetry.com What happened to the cow who went for a drive? He got a Moo_ving violation What do you call someone who is crazy about hot chocolate? A cocoa nut What do bees use to cut wood? Buzz saws Who eats at underwater resturants ? Suba diners How do really small people call each other ? On Microphones How do you fix a broken chimp? With a monkey wrench > -----Original Message----- > From: Ovid [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] > Sent: Friday, September 12, 2003 8:44 AM > To: [EMAIL PROTECTED] > Subject: AI Sales Projections? > > Hi all, > > This is a bit of a long shot question, but I've not had much luck > searching for a better solution. > I'll cry myself to sleep if I don't get an answer, but I won't be > surprised :) > > We are trying to develop an application that determines for a given movie > shown at a particular > theater how much the surrounding video stores are likely to rent out. > > For the theater, we have its location and gross sales. For the video > stores, we have location, > demographics from the US Census, school schedules, weather reports, etc. > In other words, we are > flooded with information and all attempts at going from movie sales to > rental projections have > been a simple ad hoc affair of choosing sets of data and throwing it > randomly at the problem to > see if the results are close to reality. The result has been a large, > hard-coded set of > properties that is very inflexible and of questionable utility. > > We're doing this in Perl, but I suspect we could might be able to switch > languages if that's what > it takes. Does anyone know of any similar problems and could you point me > in an appropriate > direction? > > Cheers, > Ovid > > ===== > Silence is Evil > http://users.easystreet.com/ovid/philosophy/indexdecency.htm > Ovid http://www.perlmonks.org/index.pl?node_id=17000 > Web Programming with Perl http://users.easystreet.com/ovid/cgi_course/ > > __________________________________ > Do you Yahoo!? > Yahoo! SiteBuilder - Free, easy-to-use web site design software > http://sitebuilder.yahoo.com
