N
nobull
Google won't let me post this as a follow-up but [email protected] (lynto) wrote in message news: said:
Algorithms are language independant so this question is off topic in
comp.lang.
It appears that you are taking about the famous "packing problem"[1]
which is, I believe, fairly trivially, mathematically equivalent to
the even more famous "travelling salesman" problem. These in turn are
less trivially equivalent to a whole class of mathematical problems
known as NP-complete.
[1] Aka bucketizing, aka backback problem, aka...
There are no known alorithms, other than bute force, that ensure
optimal solutions to NP-complete problems. (I'm not sure if it has
actually been proven that there cannot exist any such algoritms - you
should ask a mathemetician).
Many books and papers have been written on the subject of algorithms
to find reasonably good solutions, most of the time, in a reasonable
time, to NP-complete problems.
Perhaps you are looking of a Perl _implementation_ of such an
algorithm.
A quick glance on CPAN turned up Algorithm::Bucketizer but I have no
idea how good it is.
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