On 8/9/10, Paul Reiners <paul.reiners@gmail.com> wrote:
... (For what it's worth, this is a question that came up at the software company I work at. I tend to think there is no efficient solution, but I'm looking for a good argument in favor of that. (Or, even better, an efficient way of computing this.)
Having recently suffered a certain amount of humiliation at another site, I'm reluctant to sound unwelcoming concerning this enquiry; but I feel obliged to express some reservations. To begin with, while I not aware of harbouring any fundamentalist objections to tackling applied problems in general, this particular one doesn't sound much like any sort of "fun" to me --- but that's perhaps a matter of opinion. More seriously, if any less battle-scarred combinatorialist out there does nonetheless feel inspired to get involved, caution should be exercised to ensure that the ground rules are agreed beforehand. Some, particularly smaller, commercial outfits are liable to take a buccaneering attitude towards intellectual property. Lulled by their pleasant informality, the gullible academic devotes time and expertise to the project, to be left at its successful conclusion without so much as an acknowledgement. [Of course, such exploitation is not unknown elsewhere --- but at least in an academic environment it is actively discouraged, and on average a two-way exchange of some kind can reasonably be expected.] Fred Lunnon