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.
Access this chapter
Tax calculation will be finalised at checkout
Purchases are for personal use only
Notes
- 1.
From Karp’s 1985 Turing Award lecture “Combinatorics, complexity, and randomness” (in http://awards.acm.org)
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Corresponding author
Rights and permissions
Copyright information
© 2010 Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg
About this chapter
Cite this chapter
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
Download citation
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-642-04833-3_1
Published:
Publisher Name: Copernicus, Berlin, Heidelberg
Print ISBN: 978-3-642-04832-6
Online ISBN: 978-3-642-04833-3
eBook Packages: Mathematics and StatisticsMathematics and Statistics (R0)