On Fri, 04 May 2007 09:41:51 +0900, Bill Guindon wrote:

> On 5/3/07, Ken Bloom <kbloom / gmail.com> wrote:
>> Apparently some people around here can't stand Ruby Quiz withdrawal.
>> For those people, here's a quiz question I just came up with.
>>
>> I have a list of some items, and I would like to manually rank which
>> ones are most important to me. But it's not easy to rank them when I'm
>> looking at them all at once, so I'd like to consider them in pairs and
>> choose from each pair which one is most important to me. Then I'd like
>> to use my answers to those questions to create a ranked list. Anyone
>> think they can come up with a good program to quiz me about these items
>> pairwise, and output a ranking?
> 
> Thanks much for filling in.  I'm very interested, and I hope I have the
> time to take a shot at this one.
> 
> Could you elaborate on the rules a bit?  Do all possible pairs have to
> be evaluated, or should it deduce values based on previous answers?
> 
> banana is more important than apple
> orange is more important than banana
> no need to compare apples to oranges (pardon the pun).

I guess I'd want to know if I ran into a cycle, but I know that's a lot 
more questions. Something else that I would find interesting is having a 
way to determine the top 10 asking the minimum number of questions. So 
implement whatever answer you prefer.

--Ken

P.S. I think the Ruby Quiz needs a fourth rule: don't ask too many 
questions about what the rules of a particular quiz are. Your variation 
on the problem may have interesting techniques that nobody else's has.

-- 
Ken Bloom. PhD candidate. Linguistic Cognition Laboratory.
Department of Computer Science. Illinois Institute of Technology.
http://www.iit.edu/~kbloom1/