Abstract
If you want to invite some friends to a dinner party, but your dining table will only accommodate four people, then you might be faced with a dilemma: how do you choose three compatible dinner companions from among your five closest friends? Your buddy Art has recently broken up with his girlfriend Betty, who is now dating Charlie. Charlie and Art have managed to remain friends, but Charlie is not speaking to Dan, who won’t go anywhere without Eva, who can’t stand Art. So how can you choose your three dinner companions to have a pleasant, hassle-free evening? The best way, believe it or not, would be to make use of an algorithm, which is a set of rules that enable you to search systematically for an answer.
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Notes
- 1.
From Karp’s 1985 Turing Award lecture “Combinatorics, complexity, and randomness” (in http://awards.acm.org)
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© 2010 Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg
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Crato, N. (2010). The Dinner Table Algorithm. In: Figuring It Out. Copernicus, Berlin, Heidelberg. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-642-04833-3_1
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-642-04833-3_1
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Publisher Name: Copernicus, Berlin, Heidelberg
Print ISBN: 978-3-642-04832-6
Online ISBN: 978-3-642-04833-3
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