Sport fencing competitions are organised in pools, where every fencer
fences every other and the total score is totted up at the end. Sheets
like this are used to keep track of which bouts have been played and
what the score is:
http://www.soton.ac.uk/~fencing/files/pool.pdf
These sheets show an order of bouts for between 4-7 fencers, a typical
number in a pool. An impending competition* got me wondering how one
might use Ruby to generate those lists of bouts. A simple list of what
bouts need to be fought is easy, and I wrote a simple script that
produces an array of the following values for any number of contestants
(in this case 4):

1 - 2
1 - 3
1 - 4
2 - 3
2 - 4
3 - 4

The difficult bit is that fencers need to be given a rest between bouts
if possible, so this order won't do. Simply randomising this array may
still mean someone having to do more than one fight in a row. Not having
a mathematical background I can't think of a suitable method to approach
this, and if anyone could suggest some hints I'd be interested to know.

* I can, of course, use the existing pool sheets for the competition;
this is just for my amusement.
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