Re: Combinations & Permutations..... sort of

This is one of the "NP complete" problems. It is very simple to solve,
but the number of combinations grows exponentialy.

If you can find an efficient solution, you will deserv a "Nobel price"

On 09/29/2014 08:17 PM, Roger Harman wrote:

Put your math hats on......

I'm looking at a means to *attempt* to auto-match payments to invoices. We do not want to apply payments to oldest first and end up with a partial payment or credit leftover.

Pick an arbitrary number of invoices for the attempt - say 10.

Any combination of 1 or more of these 10 invoices that total the payment amount would be considered a match.
Could be invoice 1, or 2, or.... Could be invoices 2 and 5 and 8..... etc.

I assume it's going to have to be a brute force approach but I'm stumped on the total # of possible matches. Combinations & permutations I understand (3 out of 10, etc) but this "1 or 2 or (1 and 2) or (2 and 5 and 8)" is giving me a mind block. I do know it's a big number and I'll likely cut back the sampling size.

Any suggestions or clarifications would be very welcome.

Thanks.



Roger Harman


COMMON Certified Application
Developer – ILE RPG on IBM i on Power

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