Thanks, Don, for the highly relevant reference. In fact, my great discovery that it's easier to find the top t players than the t'th highest player turns out not to be as profound as I'd thought. A bright fifth grader could probably see that you only need two matches to select the top 2 players from a set of 3, whereas it may take three matches to find the second best. In fact, (this may be tenth grade level), the latter will happen two thirds of the time assuming the first matching pair is chosen at random. Oh well, David At 03:17 PM 8/27/2004 -0600, you wrote:
There doesn't seem to be any treatment of the top t problem in the literature. Knuth doesn't even mention it. But he does mention it. See TAOCP Volume III, section 5.3.3, problem 14; and especially the answer. -- Don Reble djr@nk.ca
_______________________________________________ math-fun mailing list math-fun@mailman.xmission.com http://mailman.xmission.com/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/math-fun