With all do respect to our esteemed monk extremely is this not closer to the 'Knapsack' and 'bin packing' class of problems which can be solved using several non-brute force techniques therefore do not fall into the general class of NP-Complete problems.

There are several books that cover detailed solutions to these kinds of problems. My personal favourite is 'ALGORITHMS', Robert Sedgewick, Addison-Wesley, 1983.

Sedgewick describes some excellent approaches to your problem.

Computer Algorithms, Inroduction to Design and Analyssis, Sara Base, Addison-Wesley 1988 is also a good source.

mitd-Made in the Dark
'My favourite colour appears to be grey.'

---

---

• Are you posting in the right place? Check out Where do I post X? to know for sure.
• Posts may use any of the Perl Monks Approved HTML tags. Currently these include the following:

  <code> <a> <b> <big> <blockquote> <br /> <dd> <dl> <dt> <em> <font> <h1> <h2> <h3> <h4> <h5> <h6> <hr /> <i> <li> <nbsp> <ol> <p> <small> <strike> <strong> <sub> <sup> <table> <td> <th> <tr> <tt> <u> <ul>

• Snippets of code should be wrapped in <code> tags not <pre> tags. In fact, <pre> tags should generally be avoided. If they must be used, extreme care should be taken to ensure that their contents do not have long lines (<70 chars), in order to prevent horizontal scrolling (and possible janitor intervention).
• Want more info? How to link or How to display code and escape characters are good places to start.