Calc Invoices to Pay?

[Fairlight]

Four score and seven years--eh, screw that!
At about Tue, Mar 04, 2008 at 11:43:41AM -0500,
Ron Kracht blabbed on about:
> >   
> What Mr. Barnett wants to do is known as the subset sum problem - see 
> http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Subset_sum_problem

That filled up my "light" reading quota for the week, Ron.  As if the
Net::SNMP docs weren't enough. :)

<Willow>Headache now...</Willow>

> I'm not sure it's worth implementing a subset-sum algorithm for a one 
> time problem but there are existing algorithms that apply to his problem 
> and it's not entirely unreasonable to ask if someone has already 
> implemented one of them.

No, but it's pretty unreasonable to expect to apply them to anything
regarding finance and have a guarantee of "the right choice" if there are
multiple choices.  I don't dispute it's solvable technically, even if it
would take a fast system a while to get it narrowed down.  I dispute the
wisdom of even considering implementing it in that kind of situation.

mark->
-- 
"Moral cowardice will surely be written as the cause on the death
certificate of what used to be Western Civilization." --James P. Hogan