Heh. "Research."

I was playing a tablet game the other day (Gems of War, if anyone really cares), and the question of how to write a program to optimize team synergies intrigued me. It's not even an important part of the game - it was just the bit that interested me. I wrote the quick-and-dirty brute force solution but it's slow and aesthetically unpleasing, so I started poking around at better solutions - it seemed like the sort of thing that would be a known problem, and that you folks would know about. I only only went to the trouble of abstracting my problem description because I didn't want to have to explain the game mechanics, and because I thought it might make it easier to recognize the general class of problem.

Thanks everyone for the feedback! As a hobby project, it may take me a day or two to have time to work on it again, but I'll definitely pop back in to let you know how it goes.