Martha Stewart called it a Good Thing when [EMAIL PROTECTED] (Greg Stark) wrote: > I don't think it would be very hard at all actually. > > It's just a linear algebra problem with a bunch of independent > variables and a system of equations. Solving for values for all of > them is a straightforward problem. > > Of course in reality these variables aren't actually independent > because the costing model isn't perfect. But that wouldn't be a > problem, it would just reduce the accuracy of the results.
Are you certain it's a linear system? I'm not. If it was a matter of minimizing a linear expression subject to some set of linear equations, then we could model this as a Linear Program for which there are some perfectly good solvers available. (Few with BSD-style licenses, but we could probably get some insight out of running for a while with something that's there...) I think there's good reason to consider it to be distinctly NON-linear, which makes it way more challenging to solve the problem. There might well be some results to be gotten out of a linear approximation; the Grand Challenge is to come up with the model in the first place... -- wm(X,Y):-write(X),write('@'),write(Y). wm('cbbrowne','gmail.com'). http://linuxdatabases.info/info/or.html "Tom Christiansen asked me, "Chip, is there anything that you like that isn't big and complicated?" C++, EMACS, Perl, Unix, English-no, I guess not." -- Chip Salzenberg, when commenting on Perl6/C++ ---------------------------(end of broadcast)--------------------------- TIP 4: Don't 'kill -9' the postmaster