Devin Kilminster has taken the lead in category III of my ongoing programming competition. Unlike Mark Ellison, who used a deterministic algorithm, Devin used simulated annealing like I did.
I'm starting to put together a second edition of the programming competition that will involve more complex relationships between prerequisites. I don't think that will make the problem any harder for simulated annealing approaches (it will just involve changing the scoring function) but it will probably require quite different deterministic approaches than the current competition. I might have two divisions to keep it fair between the 'annealers' and the 'deterministas'.
The original post was in the category: programming_competition but I'm still in the process of migrating categories over.
The original post had 2 comments I'm in the process of migrating over.